Beautiful Losers Samuel T. Francis

Beautiful

Losers

Essays on the
Failure of
American
Conservatism

Samuel Francis

BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Copley Square

Beautiful Losers

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Beautiful

Losers

Essays on the
Failure of
American
Conservatism

Samuel Francis

University of Missouri Press
Columbia and London

Copyright © 1993 by

The Curators of the University of Missouri

University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201

Printed and bound in the United States of America

All rights reserved

First paperback printing, 1994

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Francis, Samuel T.

Beautiful losers : essays on the failure of American conservatism
/ Samuel Francis,
p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8262-0976-9 (pkb.)

1. Conservatism — United States — History. 2. United States —

Politics and government— 20th century. I. Title.

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for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Ideas and No Consequences 1

Foreign Policy and the South 1 9

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance 35

Message from MARs: The Social Politics of the New Right 6()

Prophet of the Heartland 79

The Harmless Persuasion 88

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution 95

The Case of George Will 1 1 8

The Other Side of Modernism: Janies Burnham and
His Legacy 129

The Evil That Men Don’t Do: Joe McCarthy and
the American Right 1 39

The Cult of Dr. King 152

Who’s In Charge Here? 16 1

Imperial Conservatives? 170

Inhospitable Neos: A Reply to Ernest Van den Haag 176

As We Go Marching 1 8 1

Rouge on a Corpse’s Lips 191

The Secret of the Twentieth Century 1 99

Equality as a Political Weapon 208

Beautiful Losers: The Failure of American Conservatism 222

Index 233

Ackno wle dgment s

“Foreign Policy and the South,” in Fifteen Southerners, Why the
South Will Survive , edited by Clyde Wilson (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1981), 91-104.

“Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance,” Continuity 15
(Fall-Winter 1991): 45-68.

“Message from MARs: The Social Politics of the New Right,” in
Robert W. Whitaker, ed., The New Right Papers (New York: St. Mar¬
tin’s Press, 1982), 64-83- Reprinted with permission, copyright ©
1982 by St. Martin’s Press.

“Prophet of the Heartland,” The World & I A, no. 2 (Feb. 1986):
662-69.

“The Harmless Persuasion,” review of Irving Kristol, Reflections
of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead, Modern Age
29 (Winter 1985): 76-79.

“Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution,” The World &I
1, no. 9 (Sept. 1986): 547-63.

“The Case of George Will,” review of George Will, Statecraft as
Soulcraft: What Government Does, Modern Age 30 (Spring 1986):
141-47.

“The Other Side of Modernism: James Burnham and His Legacy,”
The World & 1 2, no. 10 (Oct. 1987): 675-82.

“The Evil That Men Don’t Do: Joe McCarthy and the American
Right,” Chronicles 10 (Sept. 1986): 16-21.

“The Cult of Dr. King,” Chronicles 12 (May 1988): 25-29.

“Who’s In Charge Here?” Chronicles 12 (Mar. 1988): 12-15.

“Imperial Conservatives?” National Review ( Aug. 4, 1989):37-38.

“Inhospitable Neos,” National Review (Apr. 7, 1989):43-46.

“As We Go Marching,” review of Gregory A. Fossedal, The Demo¬
cratic Imperative: Exporting the American Revolution, in Chroni¬
cles 13 (Sept. 1989): 29-33.

“Rouge on a Corpse’s Lips,” review of Whittaker Chambers, Ghosts
on the Roof Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1 931-
1959, ed. Terry Teachout, in Chronicles 14 (Apr. 1990): 27-30.

X

Acknowledgments

“The Secret of the Twentieth Century,” review of Kevin Phillips,
The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate
in the Reagan Aftermath, Chronicles 14 (Nov. 1990): 31-34.

“Equality as a Political Weapon,” Essays in Political Economy
(Auburn, Alabama: The Ludwig Von Mises Institute), No. 10 (July
1991), a lecture delivered at a Conference on Equality and the Free
Society, sponsored by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, in Princeton,
N.J., April 13, 1991.

“Beautiful Losers: The Failure of American Conservatism,” Chroni¬
cles 15 (May 1991): 14-17.

Beautiful Losers

Introduction

Ideas and No Consequences

Probably the most difficult part of compiling a collection of es¬
says written over a period of some twelve years is not the actual
composition of them so much as it is the effort to explain to the
reader why you wrote certain things in the first place, what you
meant by them, and why you think they should be preserved. Of
course, the easy way out is to claim you didn’t mean what you said
at all, that you wrote it when you were too young to know any
better, and that only a ruthless integrity compels you again to push
it beneath the reader’s weary eye. Unfortunately, that dog won’t
hunt for me, since I wrote the earliest of the pieces collected here
when I was well into my third decade. Whatever foolish things I
said or wrote by that age can find little defense now as the fruit of
juvenile excess.

As far as concerns what I really meant then as opposed to what I
would like to mean now, there is actually not much of a problem,
since for the most part I continue to subscribe to the perspective
from which most of these pieces were written, and I find that I have
little to retract or explain. Perhaps this is proof that my juvenile
excesses still prevail after all, that I simply never grew up. Nev¬
ertheless, some of the events, personalities, and books that served as
the predicates of several of these essays have proved evanescent, and
the passage of time, if not the maturation of the author, demands a
certain amount of explanation and clarification.

The general theme of these articles and review essays is the trans¬
formation of American conservatism and, more generally, of Ameri¬
can political culture in the 1980s, and even those that are historical
in nature, such as the articles on Henry Clay and Joseph McCarthy,
were intended in part as commentaries on subjects beyond their
immediate topics. They do not offer an explicit exposition or defini¬
tion of conservatism but rather seek to locate the relationship of the
American Right to the social and political forces that prevailed in
that decade and seem to be prevailing now. In the later essays in

1

2

Beautiful Losers

particular, I make use of James Burnham’s theory of the managerial
revolution in an adapted form to explain what I believe has been the
result of the transformation of American conservatism, namely, its
virtual extinction both as a serious body of social and political
thought and as a serious vehicle of political expression.

The presuppositions of these pieces are perhaps somewhat differ¬
ent from those of most of the writing produced by conservative
intellectuals since World War II. Those writers tended to approach
political theory in a way that might be called formalistic and nor¬
mative — that is, they sought to offer morally right and philosophi¬
cally true prescriptions for public affairs — and they did so in terms
of philosophy, theology, and ethics, with a good deal of attention to
imaginative literature. Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Richard Weaver,
and most of their disciples are examples of this approach to conser¬
vative thought at the highest levels of academic theory; Ludwig von
Mises and F. A. Hayek are similar examples in economic theory, and,
among many others, National Review's Frank S. Meyer was repre¬
sentative of it in conservative journalism.

My conclusion that conservatism has transformed itself into vir¬
tual extinction will surprise and perhaps even anger those who favor
the formalistic and normative approach, which does not easily stoop
to considerations of social change and historical fluctuation and is
reluctant to admit that some things, even ideas, fail. Regarding po¬
litical events as the earthly manifestations of timeless abstractions,
the intellectual mainstream of the “Old Right’’ from the end of World
War II developed a highly sophisticated body of ideas and a highly
articulate body of spokesmen to express them. Perhaps because
they were too uxoriously wedded to Weaver’s principle that “Ideas
Have Consequences,” most of the conservative intellectuals who
subscribed to this body of thought always seemed to assume that it
was only a matter of time before their own beliefs would creep up
on the ideas of the Left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an
intellectual and cultural coup d’etat, after which truth would reign.
I have never thought so, in part because I have less faith in the power
of intellectual abstractions than most of my conservative colleagues.
The historian Lewis Namier remarked that “new ideas are not nearly
as potent as broken habits,” and Burnham, describing Vilfredo Pa¬
reto’s view of human rationality; wrote that “rational, deliberate,

Introduction

3

conscious belief does not, then, in general at any rate, determine
what is going to happen to society; social man is not, as he has been
defined for so many centuries, a primarily ‘rational animal.”’1 In
the tradition of Namier (who briefly studied under Pareto) and Burn¬
ham, I place more emphasis on the concrete forces of elites, organi¬
zation, and psychic and social forces such as class and regional and
ethnic identity than on formal intellectual abstractions and their
“logical” extrapolations as the determining forces of history. Ideas
do have consequences, but some ideas have more consequences
than others, and which consequences ensue from which ideas is
settled not simply because the ideas serve human reason through
their logical implications but also because some ideas serve human
interests and emotions through their attachment to drives for politi¬
cal, economic, and social power, while other ideas do not.

However sophisticated and well expressed conservative intellec-
tualism may have been in the years after World War II, its virtues did
not assure it victory, mainly because there existed in American soci¬
ety and political culture no significant set of interests to which its
ideas could attach themselves. Hence, post- World War II conser¬
vatism in its political efforts generally ignored the philosophical
contributions of its highbrow exponents and fell back on the more
mundane considerations of low taxes and small budgets, anticom¬
munism and law and order; and the preoccupation of the Old Right
mind in that era with an abstract and abstruse intellectualism helped
ensure its eventual irrelevance. For the most part, any suggestion
that the savants of the Right ought to have attended to the concrete
social, regional, and ethnic dimensions of the human and American
conditions rather than to their purely philosophical aspects was
greeted with accusations of “determinism,” though why it is less
deterministic to say that ideas, rather than nonintellectual forces,
are the major causal agents in human affairs has never been clear to
me.

The truth is that, for all their talk about social “roots,” conser¬
vative intellectuals in the postwar era were often rootless men them¬
selves, and the philosophical mystifications in which they envel-

1. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John
Day Company, 1943), ISO.

4

Beautiful Losers

oped themselves were frequently the only garments that fit them.
Alienated from the prevailing intellectual and political currents as
well as from traditional social forms that were ceasing to exist or
cohere, the conservative intelligentsia was able to find explanations
for and solutions to the civilizational crisis it perceived only in the
most esoteric theory, and the "practical” applications of such theory
often took the form of some species of romanticism or archaism —
a pretentious medievalism, accompanied by antimodernist postur¬
ings and colored with a highly politicized religiosity; an attraction
to archaic social and political forms such as the antebellum South,
the ancien regime of eighteenth-century Europe, or the era of nine¬
teenth-century laissez-faire; and a distaste for and often an ignorance
of American history that derived from a mirror-image agreement
with the Left-liberal understanding of America as an “experiment”
dedicated to an egalitarian and progressivist proposition. If the in¬
tellectuals of the Right did not adhere to some form of archaism,
they tended, like Whittaker Chambers, simply to withdraw from
the world in despair and acknowledgment of defeat.

In contrast, the approach that I take in these essays seeks to avoid
archaism and to identify what is and what is not politically and
socially possible, given the predominant and largely irreversible
vectors of history, for a serious movement of the Right on a political
and cultural level. The archetype of this approach is James Burnham
himself and the “neo-Machiavellian” school of political analysis that
he developed and applied (mainly to foreign affairs in the latter part
of his career), and the essay on Burnham included in this collection
is an exposition of some of the philosophical underpinnings of that
approach. One charge to which this approach is open is that it sur¬
renders too much, that, just as Leo Strauss accused Machiavelli of
“lowering the sights” of political man by concentrating on how hu¬
man beings really behave at the expense of how they ought to behave,
so an approach that concentrates on the socially and politically pos¬
sible lowers the sights of the morally right and philosophically true
artillery of conservatism away from the big game and takes potshots
only at such harmless fauna as lie within range. The answer to the
charge is the same for me as for Machiavelli: those who make the
charge and favor the alternative formalistic and normative approach
have yet to show that their preferred targets can be hit by aiming

Introduction

5

higher, and the results of their fusillades so far are not particularly
encouraging.

The first essay presented here, “Foreign Policy and the South,” in
some ways represents an effort to move beyond the postwar Right’s
proclivity to abstraction and to suggest ways in which the concrete
regional and cultural identity of the American South, rather than the
abstract anticommunism of the Right or the equally abstract Wilso¬
nian millenarianism of the Left, might contribute to American un¬
derstanding of the nation’s role in world affairs. The essay was writ¬
ten in 1979 as a contribution to Clyde Wilson’s symposium, Why
the South Will Survive , a fiftieth-anniversary sequel to the southern
Agrarians’ manifesto I'll Take My Stand. The most obvious flaw of
the piece as it reads today is that most of the discussion of foreign
policy is quite dated and even recondite. It is difficult to recall today —
in the wake of the “second Cold War” under President Reagan, the
subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of com¬
munism in Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and the
globalist euphoria of the 1 990s — the malaise and near paralysis that
afflicted American foreign policy in the late 1970s. The principal
immediate cause of that malaise, which led to a number of interna¬
tional embarrassments for the United States, was the apathy about
world affairs that followed the fall of Vietnam. As the essay argues,
however, the more deeply seated reason for the malaise was less the
loss of the war itself than the deflation of the ideological rationale
for waging war there in the first place, and that rationale was the
aforementioned millenarianism that dates from and had generally
predominated in U.S. foreign policy since the time of Woodrow
Wilson.

Today, however, despite the essay’s allusions to ephemeral policy
issues and agendas and its preoccupation with such problems as
“appeasement” and “isolationism,” other concerns raised in it ap¬
pear still relevant. The defining idea of Wilsonian millenarianism is
what the essay called “the belief that America was capable of teach¬
ing the world how to become like America, that the rest of the world
did indeed aspire to be like America, and that the ultimate justifica¬
tion of American power was the practical fulfillment of this capac¬
ity — through American wealth, through American example, and, at
the last, through American arms.” Since the time when that passage

6

Beautiful Losers

was written- vtfth President Bush’s “New World Order,” the almost
universally approved agendas of “exporting democracy,” even by
military force, and adapting our national political and economic
institutions to a “global economy” and a “borderless world,” mille¬
narianism has been resurrected. If, in their earlier incarnations, mil-
lenarian ideals took the American “City on a Hill” as the model to
which the rest of the world was commanded to conform, today it is
an even more elusive “global community” that is supposed to be the
blueprint for the reconstruction of the whole planet, though there
can be little doubt that the “American experiment” continues to
glimmer as the prototype of the global cosmopolis in the mind’s eye
of many of its architects. In short, most of the calls for and proph¬
ecies of a “New World Order,” a “global economy,” or “global de¬
mocracy” proceed from the same universalist and abstract premises
of millenarianism that animated its older, Wilsonian and Cold War
versions.

Like vaudeville, then, millenarianism in the late 1970s was not
dead but only sleeping, and in the last decade, with the help of
conservatives themselves, it has woken up and resumed its self-
appointed role as the dominant ideological framework of American
foreign policy. It was the Right of the 1980s that first seriously pro¬
posed official policy projects for exporting democracy and intoned
the imperative of spreading the democratic gospel to the heathen,
and President Reagan himself constantly made use of the Puritan
millenarian “City on a Hill” image to describe his own vision of
what America should be and do, not only in the world but also at
home. The original rationale for conservative support for a Wilso¬
nian foreign policy was that the anticommunist goals of the Right
seemed to demand the assertion of some “positive” principle, and
despite all the principles that conservative literati had enunciated
and expounded for thirty years, the best the Reaganite Right could
concoct was Wilsonianism. Well before Mr. Reagan had left office,
however, the anticommunist origins of conservative democratism
had been largely forgotten and in any case, with the collapse of
Soviet communism, were soon irrelevant, and conservative apolo¬
gists for global democracy such as Gregory Fossedal found Thomas
Paine and H. G. Wells more useful for their dubious purposes than
Yoegelin and Weaver. Conservatives in the 1980s thus came to reca-

Introduction

7

pitulate the same millenarian premises that historically have been
the property of the Left, and their adoption of millenarian meta¬
phors, slogans, and actual policies is one of the major indications of
the effective death of a serious conservatism in that period.

Since much of the democratism that the post-Reagan Right now
affects is based on abstractions, its exponents show little inclination
to count the practical results of spreading democracy or to weigh
the virtues of democracy against its vices. In the review of Fos-
sedal’s The Democratic Imperative, written in the summer of 1989,
I noted that “the genuine democratization of the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe . . . would almost certainly transform world power
relationships and perhaps lead to the disintegration of the USSR and
even to protracted warfare in Europe, Western Asia, and the Far
East.” I cannot claim that that prediction has literally been fulfilled,
but it has come too close to fulfillment for comfort. The former
totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have not
perhaps become “genuine democracies,” but certainly the iron grip
they kept on the leashes of subnational, religious, racial, and ethnic
conflicts has been sufficiently loosened so that the subject peoples
have enjoyed an opportunity to leap at each others’ throats. That
development, of course, does not imply that the end of communist
power in Eastern Europe was not worth the price but only that
democracy does carry a price tag that needs to be considered before
nondemocratic societies buy it or the United States sells it.

Today the only opposition to the globalism that both Right and
Left preach is that of the “new nationalists” and so-called neoisola¬
tionists, mostly drawn from the remnants of the Old Right, who
dissented from the war against Iraq and are generally skeptical of a
continuing or expanded American global role in the absence of a
clearly visible threat to American national security. This kind of
“isolationism,” however, is conceptually distinct from the sort that
prevailed on the Left in the 1970s, when the prospects of mille¬
narian meddling were dim and millenarian spirits were low. Indeed,
the isolationism of the 1970s was no less millenarian than Wilsonian
globalism in its assumption that the American City on the Hill might
suffer a certain amount of urban decay if its government actually
did anything in pursuit of the national interest or took concrete
measures against American enemies. The isolationism of the Left in

8

Beautiful Losers

the 1970s couched itself in a typically millenarian and utopian re¬
fusal to deal with the world as it is, and it is hardly surprising that
twenty years later its exponents easily persuaded themselves to pro¬
mote a “global community” that exists only in their imaginations as
what they would like the world to be.

The globalist millenarianism of the 1980s and 1990s has yet to
meet its Vietnam, but sooner or later its utopian illusions will crack
up on the same kind of reef. Yet the resurrection of millenarianism
as the main conceptual framework for our foreign policy, with enthu¬
siastic endorsement even from the Right, suggests that the remedy
proposed in “Foreign Policy and the South” — namely, the salutary
cultural traditions of the South itself — may not be so therapeutic
after all. The embarrassing truth is that Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon
Johnson, and Jimmy Carter were all southerners, and their perform¬
ance in foreign policy is among the least happy of their legacies and
achievements. The South, as it historically flourished, could indeed
have provided a brake on the runaway train of millenarian foreign
policy, but in this century the region has generated national political
leadership that has only accelerated it, and with the homogeniza¬
tion of the South that economic, political, and cultural centraliza¬
tion promises, the section seems unlikely to provide any significant
alternative or opposition to the revival of millenarianism in either
domestic or foreign forms in the future.

If the insinuations of optimism in “Foreign Policy and the South”
were not well founded, neither were they entirely justified in the
essay “Message from MARs: The Social Politics of the New Right,”
written early in 1981 for Robert W. Whitaker’s The New Right Papers,
an interesting collection of then-young Rightists that attracted a fair
amount of hostile attention from liberal reviewers but was largely
ignored by the Right itself. The New Right movement as it existed in
198 1 had some claim to optimism, however, with the landslide elec¬
tion of Reagan and the Republican seizure of the U.S. Senate for the
first time since the 1950s. The New Right materially assisted both
Reagan’s election and the victories of several of the Republicans in
the Senate that year, but in the event neither the president and the
senators nor the movement itself was able to fulfill the promise of a
genuinely radical effort to redirect the political and cultural cur¬
rents of the nation. As the essay indicates, the New Right movement

Introduction

9

represented a hope that a new political identity was emerging that
would be composed of something besides academics, journalists,
and professional youth leaders, an identity that could actually speak
to and for the Middle American core of American society. Within a
couple of years, however, the New Right as it existed in 1981 had
virtually disappeared, and by the later part of the decade, the phrase
“New Right” itself had become obsolete.

Nevertheless, the argument of the essay that the New Right was
more than simply a political movement and constituted the political
expression of an underlying social and cultural force that sociolo¬
gist Donald I. Warren had called “Middle American Radicals” (MARs)
remains, I think, valid. Not only was it valid in 1981, but it con¬
tinues to be valid today as well, and the continuing importance of
Middle American discontent in American politics became evident in
the Right-leaning candidacies of David Duke, Patrick J. Buchanan,
and Ross Perot in 1992 and in the nomination by the Democrats that
year of a ticket that explicitly appealed to Middle American interests
and values and invoked antiestablishment and anti-incumbent
themes.

The essential reason for the failure of the New Right, I believe,
was that its leadership quickly moved to divorce it from genuinely
popular discontents voiced by groups that did represent significant
social interests and concentrated instead on formal political, pol¬
icy-making, and electoral conflicts with which most of its Middle
American constituency had no concerns. By doing so, the New Right
was sucked into a process of bargaining and power-mongering with
Washington-based elites and eventually was absorbed by them with¬
out significantly influencing them. The movement thus became iso¬
lated from its popular base and found itself easily distracted and
deflected by the largely trivial concessions it gained in the bargain¬
ing process. Moreover, while Old Right conservatives were often
preoccupied with an abstract and rootless intellectualism, the New
Right was openly contemptuous of any kind of intellectualism, with
the result that it arrived in Washington with only a vague notion of
what it wanted to do and how to do it and thus was all the more
easily swallowed up by the political establishment it confronted.
The assimilation and emasculation of the New Right by the incum¬
bent political elites in the early 1980s meant that the popular social

10

Beautiful Losers

and political movement that it had led was effectively decapitated.
The decapitation perhaps destroyed the movement, but the emerg¬
ing Middle American social force on which the movement rested
continued to exist in a dormant stage until the early part of this
decade, and its revival as a new Middle American Radical movement
in the 1990s is likely to be the major political development of the
next ten years.

While “Message from MARs” can claim to have foreseen the emer¬
gence of a Middle American Radical movement, some of the tactics
the essay endorsed or recommended for the movement may not
have been appropriate. The essay’s endorsement of a “new national¬
ism” is perhaps even more relevant today than in 1981, but since
most of the external forces then perceived as hostile to U.S. national
interests and security have now vanished, it is likely that a new
Middle American nationalism in foreign policy today would empha¬
size less expansionism and activism abroad and more opposition to
a globalist foreign policy that jeopardizes Middle American eco¬
nomic and cultural interests. Economic nationalism and the struggle
to preserve national sovereignty and cultural identity are likely to be
more important issues for Middle American nationalists than fight¬
ing communists, anti-American plug-uglies from the Third World,
and international terrorists.

The essay also explicitly envisions a far more powerful presidency
as the “spearhead” of an emerging Middle American counterelite
than Old Right conservatives generally supported. In the course of
the Reagan-Bush presidencies, however, the American Right, in part
due to the influence of neoconservative theorists and in part for
partisan political reasons, effectively abandoned its earlier, Taftian
skepticism about an “imperial presidency” and championed virtual
supremacy for the executive branch over Congress in foreign policy.
In two subsequent articles, “Who’s In Charge Here?” and “Imperial
Conservatives?” I questioned both the constitutional and political
theory behind neoconservative support for executive supremacy as
well as the practical value for the Right of the new “presidentialist”
position. In some respects, those later articles represent a retreat
from or a contradiction of my earlier support for a powerful presi¬
dency in “Message from MARs.” What reconciles them, however, is

Introduction

11

that while my earlier support for a strong executive was predicated
on the assumption that the presidency would represent MAR inter¬
ests, would work aggressively on behalf of such interests, and, using
a “Caesarist” tactic, would challenge the entrenched elite that pre¬
dominated in the intermediary institutions, my later criticism of the
apologists for an imperial presidency was based on the view that
these apologists entertained no such purposes. Whereas my main
reason for supporting executive power in 1981 was to challenge
and resist the dominance of incumbent elites, their main reason for
supporting executive supremacy was simply to protect the national
security apparatus of the Cold War state from congressional inter¬
vention and thereby to preserve intact the machinery of managerial
globalism. The pretensions of the Reagan-Bush administrations to
executive supremacy were not authentic but counterfeit Middle
American posturing. An authentic Middle American Radical view of
the presidency would be supportive of a strong executive if the
executive served MAR interests, but it would oppose an “imperial
presidency” if the executive merely continues, as it did under Rea¬
gan and Bush, to express the interests of the incumbent managerial
and bureaucratic elites in the executive branch.

“Message from MARs” offered a critique of the Old Right and
urged that a New Right pursue a radically different direction from
the one its predecessors had followed since World War II. Old Right
conservatism, especially in its classical liberal and libertarian forms,
was essentially the political formula or ideology of the American
bourgeois elite and reflected bourgeois values and interests — small
government, local autonomy and states’ rights, an isolationist or
national interest-based foreign policy, and a social ethic that empha¬
sized individualism restrained and informed by bourgeois social and
cultural norms drawn from the Protestant ethic. The limited politi¬
cal success of the Old Right in the aftermath of the Great Depres¬
sion, the New Deal, and World War II was due largely to its inability
to attach itself to any significant social and political force after the
managerial elite described by Burnham had displaced the bourgeois
elite as the dominant force in American society. The new manage¬
rial elite, lodged in the large corporations and unions, the national
bureaucratic state, and the bureaucratized educational, media, and

12

Beautiful Losers

cultural organizations, possessed radically different and antibour¬
geois interests and found in liberalism a useful formula for their
expression and rationalization.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, it became evident that liber¬
alism was not adequately performing its social and political func¬
tion of supporting managerial interests, and the appearance of neo¬
conservatism as an ideological category distinct from both the Old
and New Rights in that period can be seen as an attempt to adapt
and reformulate liberalism for a more effective support of manage¬
rial institutions and hegemony. That view of neoconservatism is
implicit in my review of Irving Kristol’s Reflections of a Neoconser¬
vative , which is perhaps one of the earliest installments in what
became a protracted and bitter controversy within the Right in the
late 1980s. While Kristol and the neoconservatives in general ex¬
hibit the virtue of avoiding the hyperintellectualism of the Old Right,
they also exhibit the vice of failing to mount a serious and radical
critique of modern liberalism, and, in fact, they are largely expo¬
nents of a variation of liberalism. Thus, Kristol is well aware of the
cultural crisis produced by the managerial revolution (which he calls
the "corporate revolution”) but his corrective for the crisis is mainly
to urge the revival and importation of bourgeois morality into man¬
agerial policies and institutions — not, as the Old Right advocated,
to dismantle the managerial power structure in the state. The attrac¬
tion Kristol expressed for bourgeois morality seemed to rest largely
on his perception that it renounces the “heroic” and “transcendent”
and settles for the practical virtues of the Protestant ethic. What he
failed to see is that precisely because bourgeois morality is content
with the homely virtues and avoids heroic and transcendent ideals,
it is incapable of creating or resolving cultural crises that demand
heroism and the transcendence of self-interest. It was the virtue of
at least some thinkers of the Old Right that they did understand that
flaw of bourgeois society, but for the most part the Old Right cri¬
tique of bourgeois society and morality failed to appeal either to the
remnant of the bourgeois elite itself, which preferred to rehearse its
political formula of classical liberalism, or to any other social force,
and Old Right intellectualism therefore remained an elegant but iso¬
lated and politically irrelevant body of ideas.

Vet, as I also suggested in the Kristol review, the quarrel between

Introduction

13

the Old Right and neoconservatives arose not so much from intel¬
lectual and philosophical conflicts as from social, ethnic, political,
and professional differences between them, and the philosophical
differences were, in fact, expressions of these social divisions. This
was a view that I developed further in the long article on “Neocon¬
servatism and the Managerial Revolution,” also reprinted below.
Neoconservatives undertook the defense of the very structures that
the Old Right had sought to dismantle and in fact resisted every
effort to develop a radical New Right populism that could construct
a mass political and cultural base for a challenge to the managerial
apparatus. The understanding of neoconservatism as a new version
of managerial ideology has been borne out by later developments
since the essay was written in 1986. Thus, what Fred Barnes of the
New Republic has approvingly called “Big Government conserva¬
tism” is essentially identical to neoconservatism, and neoconser¬
vative opposition to Old Right and bourgeois “Small Government
conservatism” has become evident in recent years in neoconser¬
vative resistance to attempts to abolish the National Endowment for
the Arts; neoconservative support for expanded federal roles in ed¬
ucation, health care, housing, and welfare policies; and neoconser¬
vative endorsement of a democratic globalist foreign policy. All these
policy preferences reflect the function neoconservatism performs
in adapting managerial liberalism to serve as the ideological defense
for and a legitimizing formula of the political and cultural apparatus
of the managerial elite. Similarly, neoconservative support of an
“imperial presidency,” coupled with support for congressional term
limits and hostility to Congress, should be seen not merely as posi¬
tions reflecting the partisan interests of a Republican presidency
against a Democratic-controlled Congress but also as perfectly con¬
sistent with and reflective of the interests of the managerial elite in
the bureaucracy of the executive branch.

The conflict between the Old Right or “paleoconservatives” (as
they clumsily began to call themselves) and the neoconservatives
became increasingly bitter in the course of the decade, and philo¬
sophical differences had less to do with the anger displayed in the
controversy than with harsh personal attacks on the integrity and
bona fides of the contestants. One of the first battles between the
two sides was a struggle in 1981 over the nomination to the chair-

14

Beautiful Losers

manship of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Pres¬
ident Reagan, the paleoconservative candidate being the late M. E.
Bradford of the University of Dallas and the neoconservative being
William Bennett. The bitterness felt by many Old Rightists at Ben¬
nett’s finally winning the nomination was due not so much to losing
the post for their own candidate as to what they regarded (accu¬
rately, in my view) as a neoconservative smear campaign against
Bradford that insinuated he was, among other things, a Nazi sym¬
pathizer rather than an unreconstructed southern conservative who
publicly and repeatedly had criticized Abraham Lincoln. Unwilling
to contend against his expressed views in public, some neoconser¬
vative supporters of Bennett (though not Bennett himself) launched
a sub-rosa attack on Bradford’s character, even as they professed
admiration for him in public. Similar neoconservative attacks on
conservative columnists Joseph Sobran in 1986 and Patrick Buchanan
in 1990 and on the Rockford Institute’s unapologetically Old Right
magazine Chronicles in 1989 also fed the anger of the Old Right at
their supposed political allies. On top of these feuds, many Old
Right organizations complained privately that neoconservative-
controlled foundations were deliberately starving them of funds
while lavishly endowing neoconservative figures and groups. Clearly,
there was more to the disagreements between the two factions of
the Right than mere ideas.

It was in the context of this controversy that I wrote a response to
Ernest Van den Haag’s defense of neoconservatism in National Re¬
view. Van den Haag, who had been a noted conservative writer
since the 1950s, was perhaps an unlikely ally of the neoconser¬
vatives, who began to claim a conservative label only in the late
1960s or 1970s. The exchange, which was properly confined to the
intellectual and political differences between the two groups, of
course resolved nothing, and the whole conflict soon escalated to
even more vitriolic rock-tossing and mud-slinging than before. On
the whole, the Old Right generally had the brains, but the neocons
had the money, and by the end of the Reagan Administration they
had become the dominant faction on the American Right, with the
Old Right effectively withdrawing into a newly formed group called
the John Randolph Club and rallying around the presidential can¬
didacy ol Buchanan. These results did little to disabuse me of my

Introduction

15

skepticism toward the influence of ideas on political and social
reality.2

While the mainstream of Old Right thought continued to dwell
on philosophical esoterica, the three Old Right conservatives con¬
sidered in these essays — Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and Whit¬
taker Chambers — actually departed from the mainstream in formu¬
lating ideas by which a popularly based Right could mount effective
challenges to managerialism and its liberal formulas. The thrust of
Kendall’s thought was toward what today would be called a populist
strategy, and Burnham, though he seems in the 1950s to have advo¬
cated cooperation with what he regarded as the historically irre¬
versible managerial revolution, followed a similar path from the late
1960s and 1970s. Chambers never showed any sympathy for the
new managerial regime and recognized in it a domesticated form of
communism that was less violent, but no less revolutionary, than its
Soviet cousin. Unlike Burnham and Kendall, however, Chambers’s
response to the revolution was one of intensely personal religious
withdrawal. Yet throughout Chambers’s work, from his earliest es¬
says and short stories, written in his communist period, through his
last letters and articles, he dwelled on the material and psychic suf¬
fering of the common man, what he called in Witness “the plain
men and women of the nation.” Despite their differences, these three
Old Rightists are perhaps the only major theorists of the first gener¬
ation of the Old Right who made any significant contribution to the
development of a body of ideas and a practical strategy that could
bring the Right out of its philosophical clouds and political archa¬
ism and point toward a realistic and popularly based challenge to
managerial power.

Just as much of the discussion of American foreign policy in “For¬
eign Policy and the South” is now dated, so the anticommunism that
frames the piece on Joe McCarthy is now mostly irrelevant. Neverthe¬
less, I have included the essay in part because it offers a necessary
corrective to a good many misconceptions about what McCarthy
said, tried to do, and actually did and, more importantly, because it

2. Lest there be any question as to where the author s sympathies lie in the Old
Right-neoconservative conflict, it should be noted that he is a contributing editor of
Chronicles and a charter member of the John Randolph Club.

16

Beautiful Losers

views McCarthy as the first significant political figure of the post-
Wbrld War II Right who actually sought to build a mass antiestab¬
lishment movement as opposed to an elite cadre of intellectuals.
The main argument of the essay is that McCarthy’s “anticommunism”
derived from his early but distorted perception of the revolutionary
and essentially anti-American proclivities of the managerial elite.
Lacking a more accurate conceptual framework for his instinctual
understanding of the elite and its apparatus of power, McCarthy
relied on the charge of “communism” as a label by which to chal¬
lenge the legitimacy of the elite. Hence, his constant invocation of
populist and antiestablishment imagery in his rhetoric, and hence
his actual success in mobilizing for a time a mass movement that
perceived the revolutionary imperatives that lay at the heart of the
American power structure in the postwar era. McCarthy’s appeal to
small businessmen, union members, and northern ethnics thus fore¬
shadows the more explicit antimanagerial and antiestablishment
appeals later expressed by George Wallace, the New Right, and the
Middle American revolt of 1992, and the continuing strength of this
populism of the Right suggests that its national political role is far
from over.

But even if it has a future, the Right will not be riding in a conser¬
vative vehicle, at least not one that would be recognizable to most of
those who have regarded themselves as conservatives since World
War II. That vehicle has pretty much ended up on the junk heap of
history, and in retrospect it is hard to see where else it could have
landed. The meaning of the world-historical change that Burnham
called the managerial revolution is that what the Old Right, in any of
its philosophical or political forms, represented and championed is
defunct. The Old Right demanded a smaller scale of government,
both in terms of the money the state took from its citizens and in
terms of the size and scope of the state, but the Reagan-Bush era
presided over and in several ways contributed to what was the larg¬
est expansion of the federal government since the Great Society. The
Old Right sought a foreign policy that would defeat or destroy com¬
munism and reflect the interests of the United States as a sovereign
and independent nation-state, but, while Soviet communism is even
more defunct than the Old Right, the latter can hardly claim to have
administered the death blow. In place of a national interest-based

Introduction

17

foreign policy, what both major parties now endorse is a univer-
salist and millenarian globalism that acknowledges the role of the
United Nations as an international arbiter and prepares the nation
and the world for evolution into the transnational order of a bor¬
derless and bureaucratically managed “global economy.” The Old
Right sought to conserve a culture that respected social tradition as
well as individual and social differentiation, but the 1980s saw the
triumphal emergence of “multiculturalism,” the cult of “political
correctness” (foreshadowed and legitimized, as I argue in “The Cult
of Dr. King” reprinted here, by the national holiday established in
King’s honor), and the aggressive delegitimization of ancient moral,
sexual, and social norms. The defeat of the Old Right and its causes
would not perhaps be so dispiriting were it not that the Right of the
1980s itself often supported, declined to oppose, or agreed to com¬
promise with these forces of revolution.

If the Old Right stood for anything, it stood for the conservation
of the “Old Republic” that flourished in the United States between
the American War for Independence and the Great Depression and
the civilizational antecedents of the American republic in the his¬
tory and thought of Europe, and it is precisely that political con¬
struct that the managerial revolution overthrew and rendered all but
impossible to restore. The Old Republic cannot be restored today
because few Americans even remember it, let alone want it back,
and even a realistic description of it would frighten and alienate
most citizens. The essence of a republic, articulated by almost every
theorist of republicanism from Cicero to Montesquieu, is the inde¬
pendence of the citizens who compose it and their commitment to a
sustained active participation in its public affairs, the res publica.
The very nature of the managerial revolution and the regime that
developed from it promotes not independence, but dependency
and not civic participation, but civic passivity. Today, almost the
whole of American society encourages dependency and passivity —
in the economy, through the continuing absorption of independent
farms and businesses by multinational corporations, through ever
more minute regulation by the state and through the dragooning of
mass work forces in office and factor}' and mass consumption through
advertising and public relations; in the culture, through the reg¬
imented and centralized manufacture and manipulation of thought.

18

Beautiful Losers

taste, opinion, and emotion itself by the mass media and educational
organizations; and in the state, through its management of more and
more dimensions of private and social existence under the color of
“therapy” that does not cure, “voluntary service” that is really man¬
datory, and periodic “wars,” against poverty, illiteracy, drugs, or
other fashionable monsters, that no one ever wins. The result is an
economy that does not work, a democracy that does not vote, fami¬
lies without fathers, classes without property, a government that
passes more and more laws, a people that is more and more lawless,
and a culture that neither thinks nor feels except when and what it
is told or tricked to think and feel.

To be sure, there are many Americans who resent and fear these
trends, and sometimes they flex enough political muscle to gain a
few more tax breaks, a handful of increased federal entitlements, or
a tenuous and temporary relief from strangulation by the manage¬
rial octopus. Their discontents and fears, if properly mobilized,
may revive an American Right and may eventually succeed in achiev¬
ing some of its projects. But almost no one wants a republic or even
knows what a republic is, and there can be no possibility of a republic
in the United States again until Americans are willing to assume the
burdens of civic responsibility and independence that republican
life demands. The American Right — Old or New, Paleo or Neo —
failed to persuade Americans to take up those burdens, as their an¬
cestors took them up in Williamsburg and Boston, at Fort Sumter
and Gettysburg, and those who identified with its cause are only a
few of the Americans who will eventually pay the price of that fail¬
ure. No matter how beautiful its ideas and theories, no matter how
compelling a chart of the currents of history’s river it drew, Ameri¬
can conservatism was not enough to channel those currents into
other courses. It is as a chronicle and an explanation of these beau¬
tiful losers in our history that these essays may serve.

Foreign Policy and the South

Nearly all observers agree that American foreign policy is under¬
going a crisis, a period of indecision and lack of direction in the
formulation and execution of our relations with the world. The con¬
sensus on the aimlessness of American international relations ap¬
pears to be universal. From both the Right and the Left we are given
advice on how to deal with other nations. It is America’s business,
say conservatives, to resist Soviet expansion and “adventurism” — in
Africa, the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, and Latin Amer¬
ica — and, we are warned, our withdrawal from the world will only
create a power vacuum into which Moscow and its surrogates will
quickly move. From the Left comes the admonition that America has
been involved too much and in the wrong way with the world; that
our investments, military bases, foreign aid programs, and diplo¬
matic functions have been covert forms of conquest and exploita¬
tion as well as causes in themselves of economic, political, and cul¬
tural destruction. Only a drastic re-design of our international policy
(and of our internal arrangements) — we are told — can realize a more
just and peaceful world order.

Yet, regardless of this advice, the drift continues, and the world
observes, with a mixture perhaps of anxiety and a certain amount
of discreet satisfaction, the lack of coherence and leadership from
the wealthiest and most powerful state in history, the avenger of
tyrants, the champion of the oppressed. Perhaps as remarkable as
the incoherence of American foreign policy is the lack of concern of
our own citizens. Public discussion of the central problems of for¬
eign affairs— SALT II, the instability of U.S. allies, the meaning and
observance of human rights, the Mideast conflict, African and Latin
American policy, the North-South dialogue — produces little reac¬
tion in a populace understandably obsessed with exorbitant taxa¬
tion, uncontrollable inflation, and the uncertain availability of rou¬
tine resources. America’s proper role in the world has been a topic
of intense debate for at least twelve years, but the discussion has
taken place in learned journals, on editorial pages, within academic

19

20 Beautiful Losers

or professional conferences, and in other largely unread or unat¬
tended locations. Probably never before in our history has America
stood at so important a crossroads in foreign policy as it does at the
present time; probably never before has there been such fundamen¬
tal and far-reaching debate on what we should do in the world; and
rarely, if ever, has there been such apathy about what we will do.

It is not impossible that the demonstrable indifference of most
Americans to the issues of foreign policy is related to the current
crisis in our foreign relations. Any society governed by deliberative
institutions must conduct its foreign affairs with the support and
interest of its members, and if the body of citizens is indifferent to
the world, there is little reason for the agencies responsible for for¬
eign policy to follow a coherent course. American society — at the
present time as well as historically — has been reluctant to come to
grips with the world as it is, or at least with the world as most
human beings outside America have perceived it. Our apathy and
drift today are the result of that most peculiar institution, American
democratic orthodoxy. Alexis de Tocqueville noted and predicted
the roots of our unsuitability for high designs in the world:

Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to
a democracy ... a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the
details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work
out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures
with secrecy or await their consequences with patience. These are qualities
which more especially belong to an individual or an aristocracy; and they
are precisely the qualities by which a nation, like an individual, attains a
dominant position. 1

Most students of American foreign policy would probably agree
that the immediate cause of our present discontents was the experi¬
ence of Vietnam, and it is to the Vietnam War that Tocqueville ’s
insights are most applicable. The United States in Vietnam did in¬
deed experience considerable difficulty in "persevering in a fixed
design,’' and our inability to use secrecy effectively became notori¬
ous. A large portion of our journalism on foreign affairs, even at its
best, has dealt with cover-ups and conspiracies rather than with the

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols.
(New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1945), 1:243-44.

Foreign Policy and the South

21

substance of our policies. Nor were we able to await the conse¬
quences of those policies with patience. Perhaps the ultimate and
most universal source of aversion to the Vietnam War was the apparent
interminability of the conflict — an objection strange to Europeans,
who have named their wars for the number of years they lasted, and
stranger still to Asians, who have given up measuring war’s dura¬
tion. The discovery by millions of young soldiers that armed con¬
flict is not as brief, clean, easy, or fun as a John Wayne film elicited
more shock than one would have anticipated in high school- and
college-educated men of eighteen to twenty-six years of age.

There appears to be, in other words, a naivete or childlike inno¬
cence endemic to the American character, a habitual expectation of
quick solutions and happy endings, a mentality that is alien to the
Old World and its derivative cultures. The belief in the natural inno¬
cence of America is a necessary prop for, the logical foundation of,
modern democracy, which is unimaginable in a society that takes
seriously the idea of original sin or its analogues in ancient and
recent thought. The philosophical basis of contemporary American
democracy is the Pelagian heresy of the natural goodness of man,
and man is most obviously good where democracy has been the
most “developed.” In the United States, according to this formula,
man started anew and brought forth a new order of the ages to
which the hagridden evils of the Old World were alien. When Amer¬
icans have thought about the Old World, East or West, it has been
with a mixed feeling of contempt for its unredeemed and solicitude
for its continued burdens. In foreign policy, the Pelagian orthodoxy
of American democracy received its most nearly complete formula¬
tion in the policies of Woodrow Wilson and his millenarian vision of
the Old World redesigned in accordance with American legends,
prepossessions, and illusions. Yet the “fixed design” of the Wilso¬
nian adventure dissolved when Americans discovered that the Old
World did not share the axioms of the design; that its implications
had certain unforeseen and undesirable consequences; and that the
whole proceeding required more blood, sweat, and tears than it was
worth — when, that is, the unpalatable realities of the world as it is
stung the callow taste buds of American innocence.

The indecisiveness of American foreign policy, the apathy of our
citizens toward the world, and the decay of American power and of

22

Beautiful Losers

foreign respect for America itself are, of course, complicated and
have many causes — not the least of which are the rise of rival econo¬
mies in Europe and Asia since the end of World War II, the with¬
drawal of the European empires in the 1960s, the development of
nationalist and racialist ideologies in the new nations, and the growth
of the countervailing power of the Soviet Union. But the interna¬
tional decadence of the United States would not have occurred in
the precipitous and often humiliating way that it has without the
psychic experience of the Vietnam War and the implosion of the
premises of American foreign policy to which that experience led.
The psychic consequences of Vietnam, it should be clear, were far
more devastating to the United States than the material ones. As
cynics have pointed out, the number of American lives lost in Indo¬
china throughout the whole of the war was nearly identical to the
number lost on highways each year, and the total financial cost was
comparable to the annual budget of some departments of the fed¬
eral government. It is through the intellectual and moral history of
America that Vietnam will enter our folklore; unlike every other
war in our history, it has many martyrs and few heroes.

What Americans experienced in Vietnam was not military defeat,
but something more serious: the inability to accomplish a set pur¬
pose. Prior to the 1970s the premise on which American foreign
policy had been conducted since at least the time of Woodrow Wil¬
son was the belief that America was capable of teaching the world
how to become like America, that the rest of the world did indeed
aspire to be like America, and that the ultimate justification of Amer¬
ican power was the practical fulfillment of this capacity — through
American wealth, through American example, and, at the last, through
American arms. It was in terms of this belief in the historic destiny
of American power that President Wilson expressed his ambition to
make the world safe for democracy. To a large extent, this belief also
animated the benevolent internationalism of the 1950s and the Peace
Corps of the 1960s. The Marshall Plan, the Alliance for Progress,
and other U.S. -sponsored programs for the modernization (i.e., the
Americanization) of undeveloped nations revealed the same under¬
lying assumption. Were not these lands inhabited by “huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,” and did not freedom consist in either
their actual passage to America or, if this were not possible, in the

Foreign Policy and the South

23

passage of America to the huddled masses in the form of American
money, American products, and American troops?

Historically, this belief in the unique capacities and peculiar des¬
tiny of America had its origins in the Puritan Yankee establishment
of the Northeast, and it is no accident that this same establishment
has preserved its most entrenched position in the Department of
State. In no other branch of government has it been as dominant,
and in no other aspect of policy formation has it been as influential
as in foreign affairs. Intellectually, the august credo of American
destiny had its origins in the millenarianism of the early Puritans.
The secularization of Puritanism led to the setting of what seemed
to be more practicable goals than that of a literal rule of the saints.
The perfection of man would come about through his conforming
to the model established by the perfected elite in American society.

The millenarianism of American diplomacy has not been imprac¬
tical in its implementation, however. Like the northeastern merchants
who sponsored these ideals, more recent exponents have possessed
both a hard head for business and a shrewd eye for the realities of
power. In the twentieth century, the millenarian authors of our for¬
eign policy have four times persuaded a reluctant and indifferent
populace that it should go to war, not for its own interests, but for
the interests of Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. The lofty rhetoric of
internationalism, world peace, and human rights has been matched
in almost every instance by ruthless bargaining for economic, politi¬
cal, and military power. But the pragmatic success of millenarian
idealism need not surprise us. It was the very archetype of Puritan
millenarianism, Oliver Cromwell, who successfully combined sanc¬
timonious idealism and brutal realpolitik. If millenarianism in pol¬
itics were to adopt a motto, it could not do better than Cromwell's
adage, ‘‘Trust in God and keep your powder dry,” and Bible-quoting
slave traders are not so far removed from modern diplomats who
cast tearful eyes on the violations of human rights by our corrupt
allies and at the same time measure carefully our trade investments
in the Soviet Union and mainland China.

Yet, ultimately, this double face of millenarianism caves in. To
construct the City on the Hill, it is necessary to bulldoze the less
stately mansions of the earthly realm. In time, with most men, the
paradoxical dialectic of millenarianism weighs too heavily. 1 he

24

Beautiful Losers

conscience cannot bear, and the mind cannot reconcile, the brutal
(or at least mundane) means by which the final vision is to be real¬
ized. So it was with the sensitive consciences and acute, finely edu¬
cated minds of the American intelligentsia of the 1960s and 1970s.
The apparent embarrassment of the Tet offensive, the haunting bru¬
tality of My Lai, the toppling of the millenarian heroes of the Ken¬
nedy administration by the release of the Pentagon Papers; and the
continuous, heckling, unanswerable questions about Vietnam from
equally millenarian dissenters all led to the discrediting of the prem¬
ise on which U.S. globalism had proceeded. Had the Vietnam War
been presented to the American populace on its proper grounds — as
a strategically necessary conflict against the aggressive forces of
North Vietnam and its allies — millenarian ideals would not have
been involved. Yet, aside from the question of whether a democracy
that wraps itself in millenarian imagery can effectively prosecute a
protracted war along cold-blooded geopolitical lines, to have in¬
voked strategic arguments would immediately have led to the ques¬
tioning of our own strategy of a limited war. If the war were really a
struggle against aggression, then why not put a permanent end to
the aggressors’ ability to make war? Avoiding this unthinkable im¬
plication, the authors of our Vietnam policy insisted on defending
their course on the grounds that the war was a struggle for democ¬
racy, for progress in the Third World, and for the millenarian vision.
They could not, of course, sustain this argument, given the realities
of our allies and the necessities of counterinsurgency tactics. The
only possible defense was that the millenarian omelette required the
breaking of several sublunary eggs, and this response immediately
exposed the unreality of the final goal.

The result of the Vietnam War in the psychological history of
America was the complete discrediting of the millenarian premises
of U.S. foreign policy, and with their discrediting there also col¬
lapsed any justification for American globalism. Dr. Kissinger, who
is possessed of few millenarian illusions, sought to construct an
alternate foundation in the balance-of-power realpolitik of his nine¬
teenth-century heroes. But this model was not adequate, as Kissin¬
ger himself came to see. It did not reflect the realities of power of
the late twentieth century, and, perhaps even more important, it
demanded too much of Americans, who disliked its apparent cyni-

Foreign Policy and the South

25

cism and the slowness with which it achieved concrete results. In
the end, even Kissinger had to admit that Americans were not suited
to the pragmatic manipulation of power and privately advised that
we reconcile ourselves to a more modest role in world affairs.

The Carter administration also sought to avoid the millenarian
illusion of omnipotence, but in its place it developed an ideology of
incapacitation. In its view, power, so far from being a bulwark of
security, was actually a hindrance and had to be compromised if
America were to play an effective role in the world. American power,
the academics of the administration told us, had promoted only the
jealousy and fears of the Soviets, who had tried to catch up and
compete with the United States. Power had made us an object of
fear and envy to the Third World as well. The United States should
therefore modify its zeal to remain clearly superior to the Soviets in
military strength, should seek a more equitable distribution of wealth
throughout the world, and should work for an international order
composed of cooperating peers rather than one dominated by con¬
flicting giants with their retinues of satellites and clients. This ap¬
proach to foreign policy also was unsatisfactory, if only because no
one could take it seriously. The rejection of power immediately led
to results that had been unsuspected by and were unthinkable to
most Americans. The devolution of American control over the Pan¬
ama Canal was disturbing in itself, and it was quickly followed by
what its critics had predicted: the escalation of Cuban power through¬
out the Caribbean. American criticism of the Shah’s regime in Iran
and its subsequent overthrow in the absence of U.S. support for its
ally was followed by a fanatically hostile and far more brutal regime
that actually became a threat. American mediation in Africa simply
led to more threats of an oil embargo from Nigeria and the loss of
initiative throughout the continent. In short, the Carter scheme for
the peaceful abdication of American global power did nothing to
impress the world and did much to attract hostile reactions. At bot¬
tom, the plan ignored a simple law of political physics: power abhors
a vacuum, and where one force withdraws, another will enter.

The consequences of the collapse of the millenarian ideal of Ameri¬
can foreign policy have been the rejection of the legitimacy and
usefulness of national power itself, and with the rejection of power
comes the disappearance of respect. What has now come to be called

26

Beautiful Losers

the “new isolationism,” defeatism, appeasement, and vacillation
that seem to hold sway in our diplomatic counsels derive not from
any inherent material weakness of the United States but from the
absence of any viable principle that justifies retaining power and
exercising leadership.

Yet there is one part of America that has been only minimally
affected by the millenarian orthodoxy that has dominated the rest of
the country, a part that — according to its critics as well as its apolo¬
gists — locates its roots and identity in the Old World and has defied
throughout its history the efforts of the millenarian vision to en¬
velop it. This, of course, is the South, and no small part of the
southern message to America may lie in its instruction on interna¬
tional affairs. Its teaching does not consist in the high arts of diplo¬
macy — though the Foreign Service might learn something from ob¬
serving the horse traders of the Old South or even the used car
salesmen of the New — nor in the content and purposes of policy.
What the South offers America in international affairs is a reformula¬
tion of the premises with which the United States approaches the
world and a reordering of American expectations of the world.

It may be that the United States will decide that it does not want a
“dominant position” in international affairs, that its own interests
can best be served in a multipolar world with many different, some¬
times competing, sometimes cooperating, centers of power. Whether
this decision to surrender power would be wise is another question,
but if it is taken, Americans must be aware of its consequences and
be prepared to bear them. The erosion of American power in the last
few years has not been the result of such a decision. Although a
modification of American might has been a goal of the Carter Ad¬
ministration, most citizens have not clearly understood it as a goal
and have not even begun to explore its consequences. The erosion
of power has proceeded from the frustrations, failures, inattentions,
and indecisiveness of both the U.S. government and the citizenry
and from the collapse of the political formulas that motivated and
justified national power. What the South has to offer America in
foreign policy is not necessarily either a recovery or a further dimi¬
nution of power, but rather a different framework of values and
institutions through which the United States can approach the world
with purpose and coherence.

Foreign Policy and the South

27

Southern intellectual history and social institutions have yielded
up little millenarianism and few expectations of a New Jerusalem.
C. Vann Woodward, in a well-known essay on the southern identity,
contrasted the mythology of America with the realities of the Amer¬
ican South.2 America has believed itself (and has been in fact) afflu¬
ent, in contrast to the historic poverty of the South. America was
successful (might we say invincible), and the South was unique in
having experienced military defeat, foreign occupation, and the sup¬
pression of its institutions. America was innocent, a noble savage
pioneering the untrodden solitude of the New Eden, but the South
had direct experience and consciousness of sin, in its guilt over the
abuse of slavery and racial hegemony. A culture the identity of which
is enveloped in poverty, failure, and consciousness of sin cannot
easily formulate millenarian ideologies, though a culture mytholo¬
gized in wealth, success, and innocence can formulate hardly any¬
thing else. The cultural identity of the South is thus far closer to that
of the Old World than to that of the New, and it approximates the
truths of the human condition more accurately. The legacy of the
southern identity in foreign affairs is therefore likely to be a far
more realistic appreciation of what the rest of the world is like and
of what it expects than was implied in the now-shattered mille¬
narianism of the past.

A realism drawn from the southern tradition should not be con¬
fused with the realpolitik of modern European diplomacy, howev er.
The realism of the South is based on a pessimism toward man and
his works that is affiliated with religious affirmation. This kind of
realism tends to distrust power and the ability of statesmen to re¬
order the world because it ultimately distrusts man himself. Real¬
politik of the nineteenth-century European tradition, in contrast,
tends to enlarge the ability of human reason to manipulate states
and peoples, to divorce human affairs from restraining moral insti¬
tutions, and to place unproven faith in power. There can be no doubt
that America has placed far too much faith in power and that it
should regard it more skeptically. At the same time, the problem of

2. C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity," in The Burden of
Southern History, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, I960),
3-26.

28

Beautiful Losers

American foreign policy has not been the amount of power at its
disposal, but the uses to which power has been put. Realism based
on the southern, tragic view of man would not hesitate to make full
use of power to pursue legitimate national interests — the protection
of security, the defense of allies, and the lawful activities of Ameri¬
cans abroad — but it is almost inconceivable that it could lead to the
kind of crusades on which millenarianism has several times em¬
barked us or to the expeditions for booty in which realpolitik tends
to indulge.

Southerners are able to draw their realism from another source as
well, for the South is more similar to the rest of the world than the
rest of America is. Poverty, failure, and consciousness of sin may be
alien to most of America, but they are the framework in which most
of the world lives and has lived since neolithic times. Far more than
other Americans, the southerner is in a position to understand the
racially dominated and their dominators, the exploitation of unde¬
veloped economies, the persistent tribal and ethnic categories by
which most non-Western peoples identify themselves, stratification
by status and kinship rather than by class and education, the pat¬
terns of deference and the motivations of rebellion. The global com¬
plaint against the United States today is that capitalism and indus¬
trial technology, democracy and Western liberalism, have undermined
traditional cultures, and this complaint — far more than the econom¬
ics of slavery or the legalisms of the Constitution — also underlay
much of the Confederate secession.

A second contribution that the South can make to American for¬
eign policy consists in what may be called its tradition of command.
Much has been written about the military traditions of the South —
the use of “colonel” as a title, the number of military schools in the
South, and the statistics on southern volunteers in the armed forces.
These traditions have led some students to speak of southern mili¬
tarism; yet militarism is a term that describes Prussian generals and
Third World despots as well. Clearly some distinctions must be
made.

The military life is an experience that is most obviously distin¬
guished from a civilian career by its adherence to the principles of
obedience and command, and it is probably the continued vitality
of this principle in the South — more than any love of violence, ornate

Foreign Policy and the South

29

uniforms, and marching music — that accounts for the attractions of
the military for the southerner. It is difficult to reconcile the images
of southern social life — its informalities and laziness — with the fer¬
rous energy of modern militarist organizations. Nor is it easy to
reconcile southern forms of violence — most typically, the feud and
the vendetta — with the calculated massacres of modern warfare.
The principle of obedience and command, however, conforms to
the deferential and hierarchical patterns of the historic South. Social
stratification in the South can be manifested in dialect, bearing, dress,
and manners to a greater degree than in other regions, and it was not
until the last generation that black southerners were generally ad¬
dressed as “Mister,” “Miss,” and “Mrs.” Not merely the military tra¬
ditions and usages of the South but also the entire hierarchical struc¬
ture of society have reenforced the tradition of command.

The egalitarian and pacific residues of millenarianism are not pres¬
ent in this tradition, which offers both a moral justification of lead¬
ership and restraints on power. In the aftermath of the millenarian
collapse, America lacks any justification for its power and any accu¬
rate perception of the limitations to what power can accomplish.
The lack of leadership in the United States, the unwillingness to
make public decisions, the art of making decisions that please every¬
one, the fear of displeasing, and the dread of hurting and being hurt
all point to the absence of any sense of command in American pub¬
lic life and render all efforts to formulate a coherent foreign policy
meaningless. The very means by which public men acquire the of¬
fices of formal leadership — by pleasing enough people to gain their
quadrennial vote — undermines the leaders’ ability to face unpleas¬
ant realities and communicate them to the electorate. The means of
acquiring leadership in contemporary America frustrates the exer¬
cise of leadership; the result is a policy of vacillation toward the
world and a condition that resembles anarchy internally.

Leadership in southern society, however, has not been the prod¬
uct of amassing votes through cleverly designed and projected images,
nor has it resulted from the mere accumulation of property and
power. Leadership in the South, of course, has been inseparable
from property and power, as it has been everywhere, but they are
not the sole sources of command. Given the rudimentary and largely
informal political order of the traditional South, it was unlikely that

30

Beautiful Losers

leadership could be acquired through the state. The apparatus of
power for southern leaders has historically been located in and vir¬
tually identical with the community itself. Church, family, landed
property, and neighborhood are both the intermediary institutions
of social life and the natural power bases of southern leaders. The
means by which influence within and over such institutions is ac¬
quired tends to correspond with the necessities of exercising lead¬
ership, so that there is no disparity between the art of gaining com¬
mand and the art of using it.

The zealous scandal mongering of politicians and journalists in
the recent past, as well as the scandals that are mongered, strongly
suggests that Americans, having lost any justification for their pre¬
eminence in the world, have also lost the ability to distinguish be¬
tween the legitimate uses of power and its abuses. Given the erosion
of the purposes of power, this is not surprising. The tradition of
command in the South, however, offers instruction not only in the
use of power but also in its restraint. A central part of the tradition
of command is the idea of the responsibility of the commander.
Whether this idea is manifested in General Lee’s solicitude for his
troops or in the southern housekeeper’s paternalism toward sick
servants, it implies a limitation in the uses of power and authority
and in the privileges that are due the commander. As in every hier¬
archical relationship, it implies a responsibility for those who are
commanded, and their responsibility to obey is communicated to
them to the same degree that the commander’s responsibility is per¬
formed. The origins of power, leadership, command, and authority
in the community thus provide legitimation for the exercise of power
as well as restraints on its abuses.

The application of the southern tradition of command to foreign
policy may not be immediately clear, since the problems of lead¬
ership in a localized community are rather different from those of a
national or international scale. Yet there are at least two functions
that an individual trained to command can provide and will pro¬
vide by the very nature of his character. First, he can recognize and
translate to the community those sacrifices and risks that are always
involved in the “important undertakings” of which Tocqueville
spoke and which are indeed part of the human condition. The abil¬
ity to induce one’s followers to assume the consequences of their

Foreign Policy and the South

31

actions, to make sacrifices willingly, and to inflict and endure suf¬
fering is virtually a definition of leadership and is not a trait for
which mass democracies are noted. The supplying of this trait to
America in the past has been no small part of the southern contribu¬
tion to American history, not only in some of the more attractive of
the Founding Fathers and in the Confederate generals, but also in
more recent figures of the nature of General Patton. The southern
capacity to continue to provide this kind of leadership in the future
will be a test to which the aristocratic pretensions of the South may
be usefully put. Secondly, the tradition of command can instill some
discipline and coherence upon foreign policy itself, not merely
within the country at large but also within a particular administra¬
tion and within the bureaucracy that oversees the formulation and
execution of foreign policy. It is not clear how much of our recent
foreign policy has been the result of deliberation and how much has
been due to the indirect and disguised actions of State Department
bureaucrats. A coherent policy cannot exist until the officially rec¬
ognized leaders have clear control of the policy-making bodies.
Moreover, whether America decides to continue the dismantling of
its power or to retrieve it, the country must make a deliberate choice
and pursue it logically and consistently. It will not do so unless the
range of choices and their consequences is made clear, and only
highly skilled and trustworthy leadership can clarify these choices.

Finally, America may find useful to the future of its foreign policy
the southern ideal of community and the southern concept of a
public order. The United States today appears to be in serious dan¬
ger of social and regional fragmentation.3 What is often called “di¬
visiveness,” the conflict of generations, races, subcultures, or of
Sunbelt and Frostbelt, is the manifestation of this fracturing. It has
developed from two principal causes. First, since around I960, sev¬
eral different social categories have developed among themselves an
awareness, a cohesion, and an ideology that disciplines them as
distinct units of social and political action. Most obviously this is
true of blacks, but other sectors — women, youth, students, Indians,
ethnics of one kind or another, and homosexuals — have followed

3- Sec Kevin Phillips, “The Balkanization of America," Harper’s (May 19^8):
37-47, for a discussion of fragmentation.

32

Beautiful Losers

and emulated blacks. Usually styling themselves “liberation move¬
ments,” these groups have challenged the conventional institutions
of American society and government, have articulated “alternative
lifestyles” that subvert the conventional American way of life, and
have formulated doctrines and rhetoric centered around themselves,
their own material and political interests, that do not hesitate to
discard any catholic sense of the public interest. Almost all political
leaders, regardless of ideology, now must at least steer around these
liberated collectivities, and many politicians actively pander to them,
recognizing that their votes are many and cheaply had and that their
causes are fashionable.

A second source of fragmentation derives from the increasing
scrabble for economic gain and political largesse. Virtually every
identifiable sector of American society — old people and young,
farmers and city-dwellers, professors and laborers, welfare recip¬
ients and corporate executives — makes some special claim for spe¬
cial consideration of their special interest. The regions too have their
special interests and political champions, who press for federal as¬
sistance (i.e., for one region to pay for another) in different forms:
land policy, energy allocations, subsidies for construction, educa¬
tion, renovation, or merely for “bail-out.”

The result of this fragmentation and internal conflict is the col¬
lapse of any general perception of the interests of the public order
and even the denial that there is a public order that has any legiti¬
mate claims. While every society is composed of groups that com¬
pete for special consideration, no reasonable determination of who
should get what is possible unless all competing groups adhere to a
consensus that affirms the values of some claims over others and
establishes regular procedures for realizing these claims. It is pre¬
cisely a consensus of this nature that America lacks at the present
time, and the collapse of the dominant millenarian ideology has
only contributed to the confusion. It is doubtful that a new consen¬
sus will be established until a particular social force, or a new coali¬
tion of social forces, imposes one through its own domination.

The relevance of the fragmentation of America to foreign policy
became obvious during the debate on the Panama Canal treaties in
1977 and 1978. A small but powerful number of banks and estab¬
lished business interests promoted the treaties for some time before

Foreign Policy and the South

33

the public became aware of them at all, oversaw their conclusion,
and encouraged their ratification. Whether the treaties were good
or bad, the immense influence of a narrow and unseen force on a
question of national policy revealed the danger of special interests
dominating foreign policy with little attention to public desires and
interests. The same kind of influence could be demonstrated in the
case of a number of economic, ethnic, and regional blocs that have
asserted their own influence in foreign affairs for their own per¬
ceived interests, and the South, like other regions, has not abstained
from this process. Perhaps the South’s involvement in this scramble
for protection and power should be added to the index of other sins
with which it is taxed.

Nevertheless, the South is in a unique position to instruct America
in the meaning and importance of a public order, and not simply by
trying to dominate in its own interests. The South has had the unique
experience of trying to define its existence as a nation and as a
subcultural community, legal but in opposition, with special claims.
While it would be futile to argue that the content of the southern
tradition is of direct use to America, ethical and philosophical prob¬
lems that the South has sought to define and clarify are those that
revolve around the nature of a public order, the legitimacy of its
claims, and the legitimacy of the claims of the part as opposed to
those of the whole.

The answer to these problems that the southern mind has formu¬
lated is that a public order is not the product of rational design but
of nonrational and undesigned human activity in time.4 Hence, the
claims of the part — individual or collective — are subordinate to the
claims of the whole, although the claims of the whole themselves
may recognize the priority of some particular claims. A social unit,
community or nation, does not exist through its physical borders or
the sum of its individual residents. Its existence is necessarily his¬
torical, reaching into the past as well as the future, and any calcula¬
tion of its particular interests must not omit those of a historical
(and therefore not entirely material) nature. In foreign affairs, there-

4. See M. E. Bradford, A Better Guide Thun Reason: Studies in the American
Revolution , Introduction by Jeffrey Hart (La Salle, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden, 19^9), lor
both a discussion and a defense of this view of society in southern and American
intellectual history; the locus classicus, of course, is Edmund Burke.

34

Beautiful Losers

fore, it is not enough merely to establish the present material inter¬
ests of particular sectors; rather, the primary concern in foreign (as
in domestic) policy must be the protection of the historic character
and identity of the community.

Yet even if the character of the society is known, there is no pos¬
sibility of formulating and enforcing a policy predicated on it with¬
out the support of the community. The particularistic splintering of
society has been an important cause of those problems to which
Tocqueville pointed, and they are indeed characteristic of a democ¬
racy, in which each component is encouraged to pursue its own
interests, and no central authority is able to enforce unity, direction,
and common purpose. The formulation of foreign policy, then, is by
no means a matter solely of “reason of state” — the calculation of the
material interests of abstract national blocs — but is rather closely
related to the whole range of intellectual, moral, and social institu¬
tions that provide a common identity for, and a definition of, a peo¬
ple. The ability to transcend particular concerns and make sacri¬
fices for the whole is the final test of any foreign policy, and without
awareness of and loyalty to the whole, there can be no coherent
foreign policy at all.

The definition of the identity of a community is not easy, espe¬
cially if it has been forgotten, but it requires a considerable immer¬
sion in the history, letters, and manners of a society. Moreover, the
very notion of a public order is alien to most contemporary Ameri¬
cans and is even abhorrent to some. Yet America, for once in its brief
and not always glorious history, must try to learn that its own expe¬
rience is peculiar in world history, that it has been unusually fortu¬
nate in coming to maturity in an epoch of untypical peace and pros¬
perity, and that it cannot continue to judge the world by the norm of
its own mythology. This lesson is perhaps what the South, and only
the South, can teach America, has in a sense always tried to teach it,
and has never been able to teach it. The failure of the South in this
respect is at least as significant as that other, bloodier, and more
dramatic failure that has haunted and informed the region for the
past century and more.

Henry Clay and the
Statecraft of Circumstance

Throughout his life, Henry Clay was considered to be something
of a ladies’ man who, though above moral reproach, enjoyed the
intricacies of flattery and flirtation with attractive young belles. In
1850 the charms of a Miss Grace Greenwood, recently arrived in
Washington, took his eye, and he sought from her some small evi¬
dence of reciprocal attraction. But, wrote Miss Greenwood’s host¬
ess, “I do not believe he will succeed in kissing her even once. You
would be amused to see how this man’s love of subduing extends
even to such small matters. He plies all the arts of flattery upon
members of Congress and very seldom fails of success.” 1

In few notable figures of American history has the “love of subdu¬
ing” — libido dominandi — been so pronounced as in Henry Clay,
and in few has it been so completely unrequited by that most elusive
of belles, the American electorate. Three times Clay was nominated
for the presidency, and each time he lost. He displayed an interest
on other occasions as well, and his wife revealed that the only time
she ever saw him in tears was after he lost the election of 1844 to
James K. Polk. During his life he held the offices of congressman,
Speaker of the House, ambassador, secretary of state, and senator,
but that of chief executive was never to belong to him.

Clay failed to win the presidency not because of defects in his
character or an incapacity to stir audiences in his support. To win
the presidency in Clay’s time required an ability to feed the appe¬
tites of the established factionalism of American politics, but almost
as necessary was the ability to transcend factionalism, to rise above
it and appeal to the sentiments and illusions that masked its varie¬
gated hungers, gave them direction and restraint, and, in so doing,
created a national community of shared values and institutions. It is
perhaps for this reason that the most overwhelming electoral victo-

1 . Quoted in Clement Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Bos¬
ton: Little, Brown and Company, 1957), 159.

35

36

Beautiful Losers

ries between 1824 and 1844 were won by the popular military he¬
roes Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison, who incorpo¬
rated in their mythical persons the imagery of heroic glory and
yeoman simplicity, suggestive of Cincinnatus. This appeal certainly
was not to principle — as the wily Thurlow Weed knew, such appeals
would lose elections — but it presupposed vague ideals that alone
could bring unity to the disparate social forces of the country.

Clay showed himself time and again to be capable of feeding the
appetites of faction — this indeed is why he is known today as “The
Great Pacificator” — though he never claimed that he could perma¬
nently satisfy them. But he was intellectually and emotionally un¬
prepared to transcend the struggle of factions and unite them in a
common bond under his leadership. It is this failure to formulate a
satisfactory public myth that was the irony of Clay’s career as Pacif¬
icator, and perhaps the most far-reaching tragedy of early American
history.

Henry Clay was born in 1777 to a Baptist minister of Virginia,
who died soon after his birth. What education he received was largely
under the informal tutoring of George Wythe, one of the great Vir¬
ginia jurists, who had him read the translated classics. Unlike his
colleagues of the Triumvirate, Calhoun and Webster, Clay was never
a man of books or ideas. His speeches are by no means unlearned,
but the history to which he appealed was largely that of modern
Europe, not that of Rome, which, through Livy, permeated the very
atmosphere for most of the statesmen of early America.2 Nor did
Clay inherit from his clergyman father a religious orientation. Again,
his speeches are full of references to the Supreme Being and to a
commitment to the basic tenets of Christianity, but Clay was not a
member of a church until his old age, after the death of his son in the
Mexican War turned his thoughts to another world. Finally, if Clay
inherited little faith or learning from his family, neither did he re¬
ceive a fortune. His mother remarried while Clay was still a boy, and
what meager property survived his father found its way into her
hands and those of her husband, who sold it illegally.

2. On the Roman Republic as an inspiration of early American statesmen, see M. E.
Bradford, “A Teaching for Republicans: Roman History and the Nation’s First Iden¬
tity,” Intercollegiate Review, 2 (Winter-Spring 1976), 67-82.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

37

Clay, then, had lowly prospects before him in Virginia, and it was
no doubt the depressed horizon of a career in that state that led him
to migrate to Kentucky in 1797. In Lexington, he quickly won local
prominence as a lawyer, especially in criminal law as attorney for
the defense, and it was said of him that none of his clients was ever
convicted.

In his early life, then, Clay appeared as something of a masterless
man, without fortune, education, church, or place. In Lexington,
however, he soon found that roots could be implanted. Though he
began his political career in the Kentucky legislature as a radical —
what he thought was a Jeffersonian — by denouncing the Alien and
Sedition Acts and championing emancipation, he discovered that
there were more rewarding causes to espouse. He defended the
chartered privileges of the Kentucky Insurance Company and sup¬
ported a movement to translate the capital from Frankfort to Lex¬
ington. These positions probably endeared him to the local interests
that already had established a predominance in Kentucky politics,
and in 1806 he was chosen to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. He
was reelected in 1810, but, preferring a seat in the House of Repre¬
sentatives, he ran for Congress in 1811 and won. In his first term, he
was elected Speaker of the House, an office by no means as pres¬
tigious or as powerful as it later became, and, by the time he re¬
signed, he had used the office to start a war, remodel the position of
Speaker, and, perhaps most remarkable, bridle the oratorical enthu¬
siasm of John Randolph.

But it was Clay’s role in pressing for war with Great Britain that
first brought him to national attention. Neither the Federalists nor
President Madison and the older Jeffersonians wanted the War of
1812, and they had the support of significant economic interests in
the North. But other interests did want war. The best known cause
of the conflict — British impressment of sailors from American ships —
was a popular justification of it, but the depression that afflicted the
western and southern United States, expansionist designs on Can¬
ada and Florida, and fear of British collaboration with the Indians
were at least equally strong motivations. Clay, as a representative of
the West, made his reputation as a war hawk and, as Speaker, man¬
aged to insert fellow hawks in the relevant committee chairmanships.

What mainly worried Clay about Great Britain was not her im-

38

Beautiful Losers

pressment of American seamen but the economic threat posed by
her Orders in Council. These had been issued by the Privy Council
of England as a response to Napoleon’s efforts to forbid British trade
with the Continent and so force the United Kingdom into economic
chaos. Though the Orders in Council were primarily aimed at pre¬
venting France from obtaining necessary imports, they also struck
at the export trade of American goods. It was this threat to which
Clay gave most of his attention in a speech of December 31, 1811;
the immediate issue was whether to expand American military
forces, but Clay took the opportunity to urge the justice and expedi¬
ency of the coming war.

Though he gave some attention to the dishonor of impressment
and declared that, if there wTere no war, we would lose “commerce,
character, a nation’s best treasure, honor,” Clay devoted the bulk of
his speech to economic grievances. “If pecuniary considerations
alone are to govern, there is sufficient motive for the war.” America,
he said, lost ten million dollars a year by the continuation of peace
and the obstacles to exports that the Orders in Council created. The
orders of embargo (though in reality aimed at France) were them¬
selves the equivalent of invasion, he argued, and he offered a rather
staggering set of statistics to support his charge. Finally, he stated,
the argument that Britain was merely responding to Napoleon’s eco¬
nomic warfare was only a mask for ulterior motives.

No, sir; you must look for an explanation of her conduct in the jealousies of a
rival. She sickens at your prosperity, and beholds, in your growth — your sails
spread on every ocean, and your numerous seamen — the foundations of a
power which, at no very distant day, is to make her tremble for her naval
superiority.*

Clay’s line of argument, that is, was that national interest overrode
the conventional laws of peace and war. It is arguable that embar¬
goes and impressment are morally justifiable causes of going to war,
but moral justification did not appear to concern Clay and the war
hawks very much. The threat to the economic well-being of the

3. Henry ( .lay. The Works of Henry Clay Comprising His Life, Correspondence
and Speeches, ed. Calvin Colton, Federal Edition, 10 vols. (New York and London:
(i. F. Putnam s Sons, 1904), 6:38, 40-41.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

39

nation was in itself a sufficient justification, whether life was lost or
property destroyed, and the prospect of international rivalry for
maritime supremacy was good reason to forestall such competition
by force.

The bellicosity of Clay’s attitude toward Britain and the national¬
istic assumptions of his rhetoric were matched by his earlier defense,
in December 1810, of extending the borders of the United States to
the banks of the Perdido River in west Florida. He began his oration
by a reflection on “the more than Aristidean justice, which in a
question of territorial title between the United States and a foreign
nation, induces certain gentlemen to espouse the pretensions of the
foreign nation.”4 This introductory statement begs the question by
assuming what the speech was to prove, that the American claims
were indeed just. The sarcastic analogy with Aristides was calcu¬
lated to embarrass those who actually considered that American
claims might be less defensible than the “pretensions” of a foreign
country.

In the same speech, however, Clay gave an extensive review of the
history of Florida and of the treaties that had governed its disposi¬
tion. Of course he concluded, on the basis of this historical survey,
that America had a right to west Florida. But not content with this
careful reconstruction, he elaborated a rather general statement on
the nature of national policy.

I have no hesitation in saying, that if a parent country will not or can not
maintain its authority, in a colony adjacent to us, and there exists in it a state
of misrule and disorder, menacing our peace; and if, moreover, such colony,
by passing into the hands of any other power, would become dangerous to
the integrity of the Union, and manifestly tend to the subversion of our laws,
we have a right, upon the eternal principles of self-preservation, to lay hold
upon it. This principle alone, independent of any title, would warrant our
occupation of West Florida.5

He then rounded out his remarks by expressing the hope that the
United States would embrace all the territory east of the Mississippi,
including east Florida, and “some of the territories of the north of
us also.”6

4. Ibid., 13.

5. Ibid., 19.

6. Ibid., 21.

40

Beautiful Losers

It must be said that Clay was not an early exponent of Manifest
Destiny, and when that doctrine became popular, he opposed its
implications for Mexico and Texas. Clay did not base his espousal of
national expansion on a divinely ordained mission hut on solid,
material arguments: geopolitics, economics, and national security.
Indeed, there is a subtle but increasingly explicit and powerful dis¬
engagement of his idea of the national interest from any subordinat¬
ing moral law. What is in the interest of the nation becomes a law
unto itself and, “independent of any title,” can be used to justify
war and territorial aggrandizement.

Apart from the ethical and practical difficulties to which such a
position can lead, there is also a semantic problem: how is “the
national interest” to be defined? There were significant sections and
forces of American society that did not want to occupy west Florida
or wage war against Britain (nor, later, Texas or Mexican territories).
How were the interests and wishes of these segments of the nation
to be measured against those of other parts that did favor such ex¬
pansion? And what were the content and meaning of “national in¬
terest” when the issues were not as clear as ten million dollars worth
of lost exports or the augmentation of national territory? What was
the national interest when the issues were tariffs, a national bank,
slavery, and the meaning of the Constitution itself? It was around
these very issues that Clay’s career revolved and on them that his
reputation rests. How then do his political realism and his economic
nationalism fare when measured on these scales?

Almost from the beginning of his career in national politics Clay
had defended protection. An important product of the Bluegrass
regions that he represented in the Senate in 1810 was hemp, which
faced strong competition from the imported Russian variety. Pro¬
tection was therefore important to Clay politically, and it also was
important personally, for his own estates in Kentucky produced
hemp. In the 1840s his son was heavily involved in the hemp trade
to Europe. This personal interest was no doubt a strong reinforce¬
ment, if not the origin, of his defense of a protectionist tariff, which
he espoused from the day he took his seat in the Senate.

The war intervened, however, and it was not until after the Treaty
of Ghent that Clay returned to the question of tariffs. Soon after his
return from the Peace Congress, Clay contended that the threat of

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

41

aggression was over. But it was necessary to maintain the military
strength that had enabled America to end the foreign threat. The
army therefore should be maintained in strength, and the federal
government should become actively involved in promoting the na¬
tional economy.

In short. I would act seriously, effectively act, on the principle, that in peace
we ought to prepare for war; for, I repeat, again and again, that, in spite of all
the prudence exerted by the government, and the forbearance of others, the
hour of trial will come. These halcyon days of peace, this calm will yield to
the storm of war, and when that comes, 1 am for being prepared to breast it."

To Clay, in this speech, the end of government appears to be the
ability to wage war. In peace, we should prepare for war, for we live
in a condition of perpetual emergency and incessant threat. Aside
from direct military preparations, the maintenance of a standing
army in peacetime (a radical departure from the traditional dread of
standing armies and military despotism that descended from Crom-
well’s time), the entire society should be mobilized for conflict. The
federal government was to undertake “internal improvements” for
the construction of canals and turnpikes; protective tariffs were to
be developed to defend American markets and create an economic
autarchy; and a system of taxation was to be developed that would
produce enough revenue to support this system. The relation of all
this to the necessities of war is explicit:

He would afford them protection, not so much for the sake of the manufac¬
turers themselves, as for the general interest. We should thus have our wants
supplied, when foreign resources are cut off, and we should also lay the basis
of a system of taxation, to be resorted to when the revenue from imports is
stopped by war.7 8

In the twentieth century, this kind of exhortation has not been
unfamiliar to Americans. Changes in American domestic policies
have frequently been justified by appeals to similar reasoning about
“national security,” and many Americans in this century have found
such arguments plausible with respect to threats from Germany,

7. Ibid., 98.

8. Ibid.

42

Beautiful Losers

Japan, and the Soviet Union. But in 1816, Clay’s apology must strike
us as odd. All of Europe from Lisbon to Moscow was exhausted from
a generation of wars and revolution. Britain, though victorious, had
also been forced into retreat in the conflict just ended. Where then
was the threat? From what source did Clay perceive new challenges
to American independence? The threat was never specified but was
merely assumed and asserted, and Clay never defined “the general
interest” or distinguished it from particular interests that would
benefit from his proposals.

Clay’s “American System” of internal improvements and protec¬
tive tariffs was not adopted, but in 1824, Clay again returned to his
old theme and delivered what became a locus classicus of protec¬
tionism. Once more he appealed to the needs of the common de¬
fense in upholding his plan.

Its importance, in connection with the general defense in time of war, can
not fail to be duly estimated. Need I recall to our painful recollection the
sufferings, for the want of an adequate supply of absolute necessaries, to
which the defenders of their country’s rights and our entire population,
were subjected during the late war? Or to remind the committee of the great
advantage of a steady and unfailing source of supply, unaffected alike in war
and in peace?9

But it was in his appeal to the anti-tariff southerners that Clay touched
a fundamental idea in his conception of the Union. The South found
a protective tariff objectionable because its residents were them¬
selves consumers. It was they who, lacking their own manufactur¬
ing centers, would feel the burden of the increased costs of imports
that would result. Clay was well aware of this divergence, and he
sought to meet it directly.

Mr. Chairman, our confederacy comprehends, within its vast limits, great
diversity of interests: agricultural, planting, farming, commercial, navigat¬
ing, fishing, manufacturing. No one of these interests is felt in the same
degree, and cherished with the same solicitude, throughout all parts of the
Union. Some of them are peculiar to particular sections of our common
country. But all these great interests are confided to the protection of one
government — to the fate of one ship — and a most gallant ship it is, with a

9. Ibid., 29 2.

Henry Clay ancl the Statecraft of Circumstance

43

noble crew. If we prosper, and are happy, protection must be extended to all;
it is due to all. 10

Clay conceived of American society as a collection of distinct
economic interests, correlated with geographical sections. Each
interest, and hence each section, found itself in competition and
conflict with the others. Unchecked, the rivalry would result in
either the dissolution of the Union or the dominance of one sec¬
tional interest at the expense of the others. But Clay proposed an
alternative to such fierce and suicidal conflict: the federal govern¬
ment would be a judge and arbitrator among the contestants. He
outlined the principle hv which the judge would reach his decision:

The inquiry should be, in reference to the great interests of every section of
the Union (I speak not of minute subdivisions), what would be done for those
interests if that section stood alone and separated from the residue of the
republic? 1 1

Clay argued that his tariff proposals contained “a case for mutual
concession, for fair compromise.” It was through “compromise”
that the contending economic and sectional interests were to be
reconciled: “neither, it is true, gets all that it wants, nor is subject to
all that it fears.”12

Clay conceived of the Union as a kind of mechanism in which
each part had a separate functioning from the others. It was a mech¬
anism in which each part was at least discrete and separate from,
and often in conflict with, the others. The source of conflict was
primarily economic and material, and only a compromise of eco¬
nomic interests could assure the smooth operation of the united
machine.

Clay’s proposal — and it was a model for his great efforts at later
compromises — did not work. It was attractive, simple, and well
intentioned, but it ignored certain profound realities for which Clay
could find no answer and which he probably never understood. His
conception of the Union as a mechanism of separate and dynamic
parts had considerable truth in it, but it lacked a dimension that

10. Ibid., 290.

11 Ibid., 290-91.
12. Ibid., 291.

44

Beautiful Losers

could account for the noneconomic needs of the contending sec¬
tions. In 1824, the contention over the tariff was largely economic,
but the communities that the tariff problem was creating among
both its advocates in the North and its enemies in the South were
becoming more than economic subcultures. They were in the pro¬
cess of forming separate civilizations, with separate ideas of the
nature and purposes of man and, hence, different conceptions of
the ends of government, law, and social and economic arrangements.
As the two embryonic civilizations differentiated themselves, the
consensus that had originally united them and was the only basis for
political compromise between them began to disintegrate. Clay’s
pragmatic and economic nationalism had too little to say to these
two aborning civilizations, too little to speak to their respective
identities and aspirations, to be useful in forging a permanent, com¬
promising settlement between them. All it could offer in the ideal of
Union was a rather purposeless bond that served only as an instru¬
ment for mutual concessions. Only the rational calculation of sec¬
tional interests would lead each party to limit its appetites and de¬
mands, but what Clay’s conception did not perceive was that in such
an economic mechanism, rational calculation could just as easily lead
to the conclusion that a section could dominate the others as to Clay’s
inference that unless it made concessions, it would be dominated.

This problem became evident in 1824. Clay argued that his Amer¬
ican System offered something for every section. Protection would
not harm the South because the system would encourage domestic
manufactures. Southerners would therefore be able to consume at
the same price domestically what they had previously imported.
The problem was that, in 1824, there was no reason for the South to
compromise. Clay was visibly vulnerable to the charge of “special
interest” himself when his own and his section’s hemp interests
were discussed. This in itself jeopardized his self-appointed role as
the designer of a fair compromise. Furthermore, southerners and
other free-traders saw through the claim of the system to impar¬
tiality. Churchill C. Cambreleng of New York argued that it would
place the control of all manufacturing in the hands of “capitalists”
(i.e., plutocrats). The centralization implicit in Clay’s proposals
aroused old fears of a Federalist crypto-monarchy and rule by vested
financial and manufacturing interests.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

45

The South’s hostile reception of Clay’s proposals for tariff com¬
promise pointed to the essential weakness of his plan and to the
flaw in his ideal of compromise. Given the vigor of the various
sectional interests, why should they make concessions? Why should
they not push their own interests to the limit, either by nullification,
secession, or, if it were open to them, by domination of the federal
government? Clay’s ideas of the social bond — naked economic self-
interest, to be checked suddenly by a mysterious willingness to com¬
promise — could provide no serious answer.

In the event, the Tariff of 1824 passed the House by five votes, was
severely watered down in the Senate, and was ultimately signed into
law by President Monroe. It satisfied no one — voting was largely
along economic lines — and, perhaps for that reason, lasted only
until 1828. The South was opposed to it, but New England was not
yet committed to support of a tariff or to the industrial economy it
was intended to protect. It was in this debate that Daniel Webster
made one of the strongest cases ever argued for free trade, a case he
repudiated four years later. Compromise, then, was still feasible to
some in 1824, but the other aspects of Clay’s American System —
internal improvements and a national bank — were discarded.

Controversy over protection rose to a height with the Tariff of
Abominations in 1828, which protected not only manufactured
goods but also the raw materials themselves. Ironically, its advo¬
cates hoped to win the North for Jackson by supporting it and to
win the South as well when its extreme duties were rejected. Its
northern supporters refused to give it up, however, and caused it to
be adopted. That result was revealing in itself, for it showed that
sectional interest would predominate over a desire for national har¬
mony when the two seemed to conflict and when there was no
reconciling principle.

Clay did not support the Tariff of Abominations, but neither did
he welcome the crisis that ensued. South Carolina refused to recog¬
nize the ruinous duty and claimed the right to “nullify” federal legis¬
lation that it found unconstitutional. This response, gathering force
since 1828, erupted into a formal Ordinance of Nullification in 1832,
when the 1828 duties were not sufficiently reduced by the tariff of
that year.

The refusal of northern protectionists to modify the duties of the

46

Beautiful Losers

Tariff of Abominations in 1828 and the South Carolinian attempt to
nullify the moderated duties of 1832 indicate the process of sec¬
tional cleavage that was developing within the Union. Jackson’s re¬
sponse to nullification would have been to send troops to South
Carolina to enforce federal law, but Clay’s approach was typically
moderate. In 1833, he sponsored a “Compromise Tariff” that suc¬
ceeded in persuading South Carolina to withdraw its ordinance.
Clay’s measure called for a gradual reduction of duties over a nine-
year period to a maximum level of 20 percent and for additions to
the list of imported goods exempt from duties.

Again, Clay sought to mollify both sections by balancing their
interests in a common bill. “I want harmony,” he declared, on Feb¬
ruary 12, 1833, in the Senate. “I wish to see the restoration of those
ties which have carried us triumphantly through two wars. I delight
not in this perpetual turmoil. Let us have peace, and become once
more united as a band of brothers.” 13 In arguing with those free¬
traders who objected to a tariff on principle, Clay counseled pru¬
dence. The manufacturers would not accept a trade policy that left
them exposed to the invasion of foreign imports, and southern re¬
fusal to compromise would lead only to the legislative dominance of
the manufacturing North.

But if the measure should be carried by the common consent of both parties,
we shall have all security; history will faithfully record the transaction . . .
that it was as oil poured from the vessel of the Union to restore peace and
harmony to the country . . . here is all the reasonable security that can be
desired by those on the one side of the question, and much more than those
on the other would have by any unfortunate concurrence of circumstances. 14

Clay’s approach to the tariff controversy is typical of his skeptical,
pragmatic, and fundamentally conservative conception of politics.

It would be vain and foolish to proceed at all times, and under all circum¬
stances, upon the notion of absolute certainty in any system, or infallibility
in any dogma, and to push these without regard to any consequences. With
us . . it is a question of mere expediency as to the form, the degree, and
the time that the protection shall be afforded. . . . we ought not to over-

13- Ibid , •’ S43-
1 4 . Ibid., 5 *5.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

47

look what is due to those who honestly entertain opposite opinions to large
masses of the community, and to deep, long-cherished, and growing
prejudices. ,s

This is the language of Burke, of what Richard Weaver called the
“rhetoric of circumstance,” and the Old Whig language of the Fram¬
ers at their best.16 To those who identify politics with the approx¬
imation of the social order to transcendent truths, it would not be
palatable, nor would it be to those who see in this kind of accom¬
modation to circumstances a threat to their own social order. Nev¬
ertheless, it is an ancient school of statecraft that, in Henry Clay’s
time and by his efforts, appeared to be fruitful.

Yet it is not a style that always works. Its success depends upon a
set of shared values and common institutions among the contending
parties. Only when both sides share fundamental values in common
can their differences be reconciled and their separate interests ac¬
commodated to each other in a satisfactory compromise. In the
1830s, the North, the South, and the West still shared such a funda¬
mental orthodoxy, and the politics of compromise could work. But
it was the weakness of Henry Clay — and it is perhaps the inherent
flaw of Burkean or “circumstantial” conservatism — that this style of
statecraft could not create or restore such common ground. Burke
himself probably understood this problem (hence the pessimism of
his later years), but it is doubtful that Clay ever perceived it.

Clay’s conservatism, in other words, presumed too much. It took
for granted a community of values and interests that defined the
United States in the early nineteenth century, and therefore there is,
despite its sophisticated and worldly appeal, a naivete and a paro¬
chialism within it that Clay expressed in his summation in 1833-

Above all, I count upon the good effects resulting from a restoration to the
harmony of this divided people, upon their good sense and their love of
justice. Who can doubt, that when passions have subsided, and reason has
resumed her empire, that there will be a disposition throughout the whole
Union, to render ample justice to all its parts? Who will believe that any
section of this great confederacy would look with indifference to the pros-

15. Ibid., 557.

16. See Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric { Chicago: Henry Regnery Company,
1965), chap. 3, and for Weaver's description of Clay as “the archetypal Whig’ pH)

48

Beautiful Losers

t rat ion of the interests of another section, by distant and selfish foreign na¬
tions, regardless alike of the welfare of us all? . . . The people of the United
States are brethren, made to love and respect each other. iMomentary causes
may seem to alienate them, but, like family differences, they will terminate
in a closer and more affectionate union than ever. And how much more
estimable will be a system of protection, based on common conviction and
common consent, and planted in the bosoms of all, than one wrenched by
power from reluctant and protesting weakness?1”

Clay never specifically defined the content of the American ortho¬
doxy, which he seems to have regarded as a law of nature. That he
believed in such a common, national bond is clear, but at the most it
seems to have consisted, in his mind, of a common pursuit of mate¬
rial prosperity and of national independence from foreign threats.
The issues with which he was most associated, with the exception
of the slavery question, dealt with the material level of affluence:
the American System, the national bank, and the tariff controversy.
That Clay in his early career was equally concerned over foreign
threats is clear from his rather ferocious rhetoric in support of war.
But, though his language moderated after the Treaty of Ghent, there
persisted in his mind a careful attention to national independence.
We have already seen his efforts to relate his American System to a
national need for self-defense. In the passage quoted above from his
speech on the Compromise Tariff, he again raised the specter of
“prostration ... by distant and selfish foreign nations.” And, in his
reply to President Jackson’s veto of the recharter of the Second Bank
of the United States in 1832, he returned to the same theme.

In 1811 Clay had opposed the national bank, but in 1816, he
reversed himself and supported it. In 1832 he again supported its
rechartering and found himself obliged to account for his reversal.
In response to the charge that the foreign interests in the bank would
come to dominate American economic life and public policy, Clay
argued that, had the bank existed on the same scale during the war
as in 1832,

We should have avoided many of the disasters of that war, perhaps those of
Detroit and at this place. The government would have possessed ample means

17 Clay, Works . 7:561.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

49

for its vigorous prosecution; and the interest of foreigners, British subjects
especially, would have operated upon them, not upon us. 18

“The war and the fatal experience of its disastrous events had changed
me,” he declared.

In 1811, I believed a bank of the United States not necessary, and that a safe
reliance might be placed on the local banks, in the administration of the
fiscal affairs of the government. The war taught us many lessons, and among
others demonstrated the necessity of the bank of the United States, to the
successful operations of the government. 19

In Clay’s mind, then, the need for national defense colored a vari¬
ety of issues that ostensibly had nothing to do with military affairs.
This is not to say that Clay was a jingoist (after 1815) or a militarist.
He was not in favor of the Mexican War, and a theme as constant in
his speeches as prosperity or defense was his dread of a Caesarian
military state. His first attack on Andrew Jackson, for which the
general never forgave him, came in response to Jackson’s summary
expedition into Spanish Florida in 1818, and Clay portrayed his
victim as an insubordinate aggressor who sought to place military
above civilian authority.

What then was the point of Clay’s persistent concern for national
defense when there were no visible enemies and when he plainly
did not desire a campaign of imperial acquisition? Clay’s conception
of American society was that it consisted of a diverse aggregate of
sectional, class, and political interests. Each interest had its own
aspirations, ideas, values, and ambitions, and each was in opposi¬
tion to the others. Without compromise, the struggle of factions
would destroy the country, either leaving it torn apart or unifying it
under the domination of a particular group. Yet, given this perpetual
conflict of self-interests, there was no common ground on which
the factions could unite. In a conception of society such as this, only
a perception of an external threat could bring unity. It was man¬
ifestly in the interest of all to unite against the dangers of invasion
and conquest or of foreign economic domination. Hence, “national
interest” in the pluralistic and appetitive confederacy of factions

18. Ibid., 530.

19. Ibid., 528.

50

Beautiful Losers

that Clay perceived could be defined only in terms of a common,
visible enemy, and the only way to establish harmony and a founda¬
tion for fraternal compromise was to emphasize the threat to each
and every one of the contending factions.

That there was no such external threat to the United States during
the whole of the nineteenth century did not matter a great deal to
Clay. What was important was to find a common ground and a
common symbol around which all groups and sections could unite.
But ultimately the nonexistence of a national threat did matter, for
two reasons. In the first place, the symbol proposed by Clay failed
to be convincing simply because he could not find a believable threat.
In lieu of a common and external real enemy, therefore, the dispa¬
rate forces that he sought to unite increasingly turned on each other.
Secondly, it mattered because, if such a threat had existed, or if its
existence had been credible, the measures Clay proposed in the
American System and its related concepts would have so transformed
the Republic, so offended and threatened it from all sides, that the
appeal to a common danger would not have been effective. This had
already happened in the War of 1812, when hawks and doves di¬
vided along clear factional lines. And it was to recur in the Mexican
War. In 1812, some sections had opposed the war because they were
convinced it was merely a transparent adventure that would help
only their rivals. In the case of Texas and Mexico, the southern case
for expansion was again transparently related to the protection of
slavery. Thus, the appeal to a common threat as a principle of national
reconciliation was not effective and indeed was capable of having
the opposite effect, of promoting sectional conflict. The simple
truth was that, despite the large element of realism in Clay’s view of
society as a perpetual contest of factions, there was very little in that
view to induce actual compromise, let alone marshal a serious effort
by all sides to achieve national harmony.

The Compromise Tariff of 1833 worked in the sense that it in¬
duced South Carolina to withdraw the Nullification Ordinance —
which it was already looking for a face-saving way to do — and in
the sense that it preserved a liveable society for northern protec¬
tionists and southern free-traders for the future. But the tariff con¬
troversy was almost purely an economic issue and was already be-

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

51

coming stale, though other issues were beginning to arise that could
not so easily be resolved.

Clay remained in the Senate until 1842, but his activities were
almost entirely devoted to rather transient political questions. There
is no great value served by pursuing his feuds with Andrew Jackson
and Martin Van Buren, his struggle with Webster and Thurlow Weed
to control the Whig party, or his conflict with John Tyler over the
bank. The emerging issue of American politics was slavery and its
relationship to the future of the Union, and it is in regard to these
problems that Clay’s activities are remembered.

The importance of slavery in national politics is represented by
the debate over the annexation of Texas, which, under its president,
Sam Houston, moved closer to the orbit of the United States. Within
the country, the question of annexation was directly connected
with the question of slavery. The South, seeing an opportunity to
expand the number of threatened slave states, was firmly in favor of
annexation. The West was divided, and, though the North was not
unanimously opposed, the abolitionists were. John Quincy Adams
declared that annexation would mean dissolution of the Union, and
Daniel Webster also opposed it. Calhoun, of course, was strongly
annexationist, and it was he whom President Tyler selected to be
secretary of state for the specific purpose of negotiating the treaty
of annexation.

Because of the sectional controversy over annexation, it quickly
became an issue of the 1844 presidential campaign. The Democrat
most likely to carry the party’s nomination was Martin Van Buren,
and Clay was heavily favored for the Whigs’. This early lead caused
Van Buren and Clay to meet privately at the latter’s Ashland planta¬
tion to establish some common ground, according to Clay, whereby
the potentially explosive problem of annexation could be defused.
Both therefore declared themselves against the annexation of Texas.

Clay’s position, defined in his “Raleigh Letter,” was quite simply
that annexation would inevitably lead to war with Mexico and that
what the country needed was “union, peace, and patience.” Van
Buren ’s position was virtually identical, though less strongly worded,
and, had he in fact been nominated, the issue might not have excited
national attention.

52

Beautiful Losers

But partly because of his opposition to annexation, Van Buren
found himself deadlocked out of the nomination, which was then
thrown to James K. Folk, the Speaker of the House, who was an
open expansionist. The ensuing campaign therefore came to hinge
on the Texas question, and Polk began to cut into Clay’s southern
support. Faced with the loss of the South, Clay then had to modify
the stand he had taken in the Raleigh Letter. He wrote two more
letters from Alabama in which he explained that he had no personal
objection to annexation but only feared a war with Mexico. This
more moderate position, however, while it may have protected Clay’s
standing in the South, left him open to the abolitionists’ attacks in
the North. It was in New York that they were able to draw defecting
Whigs into their Liberty party, and it was the loss of New York that
cost Clay the election.

Clay’s effort to articulate a compromise position on annexation
that would please both sides illustrates the fundamental weakness
of his consensual, equilibrist approach to politics. The only consen¬
sus on which compromise could be based was rapidly evaporating.
Clay’s view of politics did not permit him to make a different ap¬
proach, however, or to formulate a clear-cut position that would
commit him to one side or the other.

The inadequacy of his insistence on harmony is further revealed
in his remarks on slavery itself. In 1839 Clay approached the subject
in a speech in the Senate. The Constitution, he declared, “never
could have been formed upon the principle of investing the general
government with authority to abolish the institution at its pleasure.”
The problem of slavery, he noted, and no doubt correctly, “was
happily compromised and adjusted in a spirit of harmony and patri¬
otism.”20 Characterizing the abolitionists as men obsessed with a
single abstract idea, he argued against emancipation without de¬
fending slavery itself. His arguments were constitutional, economic,
and social, but he did not deal directly with the moral foundations
of slavery.

In human affairs we are often constrained, by the force of circumstances and
the actual state of things, to do what we would not do, if that state of things
did not exist. The slaves are here, and here must remain, in some condi-

20. Ibid., 8:150.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

53

tion. ... In such an alternative, who can hesitate? Is it not better for both
parties that the existing state of things should he preserved, instead of expos¬
ing them to the horrible strifes and contests which would inevitably attend
an immediate abolition?21

More than a century later, the advice of Clay sounds more sensible
than it did at the time. The “happy compromise” of the Framers,
however, was what we would now call “benign neglect” and was no
more possible in the 1840s than it was in the 1960s. The abolition¬
ists appealed to the nature of man and to the ethics of slavery, rest¬
ing their case ultimately on a “higher law” than the Constitution.
This attack pushed Calhoun in 1844 to defend slavery as an institu¬
tion beneficial in itself. The issue, in other words, had simply moved
beyond the gentlemanly spirit of “happy compromise,” with a pru¬
dent reflection on the disastrous alternatives to the status quo. The
argument had become metaphysical, and Clay’s skeptical pragma¬
tism had nothing to contribute to such disputations.

Clay — and with him, the system of government and its philo¬
sophical presuppositions that had pertained since the drafting of
the Constitution — was becoming irrelevant, and the final irrelevance
of his politics of consensus and compromise became clear in what,
ironically, is commonly regarded as his last and greatest achievement.

The Compromise of 1850, like the Texas question, grew out of the
expansionist energies that obsessed the country in Manifest Destiny.
The acquisition of vast areas of land from Mexico demanded that
this territory be divided into states and brought into the Union. But,
as with Texas, the process of division would involve the extension of
slavery. In 1846, Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania intro¬
duced an amendment to Polk’s bill for purchasing the land from
Mexico that would have forbidden slavery in any of the new ter¬
ritory. Clearly, the South would oppose doggedly the Wilmot Proviso’s
disposition of the new land, for it threatened to do away with the
Missouri Compromise, which, since 1820, had governed the exten¬
sion of slavery in the territory of the Louisiana Purchase. Calhoun,
sensing that the ensuing battle would be fundamental for the future
of the country and especially of the South, girded himself for his
final combat, and Clay also returned to Washington for the last time.

21. Ibid., 151.

54

Beautiful Losers

Clay had retired from the Senate in 1842 and devoted himself to
the pursuit of the presidency in 1844. Afterward, he faced for a while
financial ruin, the disappointment of his presidential ambitions, the
alienation of Kentucky, and the death of his son at Buena Vista. In
1850 Clay was seventy-three years old, but his health and finances
had sufficiently improved so that he was able to overcome dissidents
in the Kentucky legislature and win unanimous election to the Senate
in 1849. His purposes in returning are unclear, but it is doubtful that
he sought to reclaim his title as a designer of compromises.

Whatever his motives at this rather grisly age, it was compromise
that Clay sought to achieve once he arrived in Washington. The
intransigence of both South and North appeared formidable. In
Nashville, a convention of southern delegates was about to meet that
would discuss the feasibility of secession, and Calhoun declared that
if the North sought to exclude all slavery from New Mexico and
California, he was for disunion. Horace Mann, on the part of the
North, spoke of a servile war as being preferable to the extension of
slavery, and the presence of William Seward, a declared abolitionist,
as President Taylor’s chief adviser seemed to give weight to Cal¬
houn's fears.

It was in this atmosphere then that Clay introduced, in January
1850, eight resolutions designed to give something to each side.
California was to enter the Union without restriction of slavery; this
meant that it would enter as a free state. The rest of the territory was
also to be unrestricted; this could mean anything, but it certainly
meant no prohibition of slavery. Second, the dispute over the borders
of Texas and New Mexico was to be decided in favor of the latter
(thus reducing the size of the slave state), but the federal government
was to assume the public debts of Texas. Third, Clay proposed to
abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia but to guarantee
slavery itself there as long as it existed in neighboring Maryland.
And last, Clay proposed that Congress refuse to tamper with the
interstate slave trade and pass a more effective fugitive slave law.

In the course of the ensuing debate, Clay appealed again to the
integrity and harmony of the Union. It was then that he pronounced
the words that were to be inscribed on his grave: “no South, no
North, no East, no West.” And a few months later he delivered his
most expansive statement on his concept of compromise.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

55

Life itself is but a compromise between death and life, the struggle continu¬
ing throughout our whole existence, until the great Destroyer finally tri¬
umphs. All legislation, all government, all society, is formed upon the princi¬
ple of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these, every
thing is based. I bow to you to-day because you bow to me. You are respectful
to me because 1 am respectful to you. Compromise is peculiarly appropriate
among the members of a republic, as of one common family. Compromises
have this recommendation, that if you concede any thing, you have some¬
thing conceded to you in return. Treaties are compromises made with for¬
eign powers contrary to what is done in a case like this. Here, if you concede
any thing, it is to your own brethren, to your own family. Let him who
elevates himself above humanity, above its weaknesses, its infirmities, its
wants, its necessities, say, if he pleases, I never will compromise, but let no
one who is not above the frailties of our common nature disdain compromises.22

Clay in this peroration erects his idea of politics into a Weltan¬
schauung. Compromise is the only means imperfect men have to
achieve a stable and regular way of life; it is a means that is not only
expedient but imbedded in the fabric of the universe, in life itself.
This was the closest to a metaphysical expression and defense of his
political thought that Clay was ever to come.

So certain was Clay that this appeal to the common bond of the
Union would resolve the controversy that he sought a simple and
direct approach. He supported what came to be called the “Omni¬
bus Bill,” introduced by Henry Foote of Mississippi, which embod¬
ied most of his resolutions in one document. Clay assumed that
congressmen would support what they opposed in order to see
passed what they supported. But he underestimated the bitterness
that divided the sections. On July 31 , the Senate tore the bill to
shreds when those who disdained compromise took advantage of
parliamentary maneuvering and allowed only the meaningless rump
of the bill to pass. It is said that Jefferson Davis was visibly grinning
and that William Seward actually danced in happiness at the col¬
lapse of Clays bill.

Clay accepted defeat and left Washington to recuperate from the
six-month struggle. But Stephen Douglas saved the measure. Realiz¬
ing that sectionalism was too strong for Clays appeal to a common
purpose to work, Douglas resurrected the plan by submitting it piece¬
meal to different sectional groupings. In other words, Douglas ap-

22. Ibid., 9:418.

56

Beautiful Losers

parently understood that no basis for a comprehensive compromise
existed and managed to steer it through the Senate by taking advan¬
tage of different and opposing blocs. Clay had relied on a vestigial
sense of national harmony and a presumed willingness to compro¬
mise in order to preserve it, and Clay had lost. Douglas abandoned
hope for national harmony and accepted sectional conflicts, and
Douglas, by September 17, had succeeded in getting the substance
of Clay’s proposals passed into law.23

The way in which the Compromise of 1850 actually passed, there¬
fore, refuted the assumptions on which Clay had based his pro¬
posal. He was indeed correct that “all society, is formed upon the
principle of mutual concession,” but a willingness to make mutual
concessions in turn depends on a recognizably shared set of values
among the mutually conceding groups. In 1850, there was not suffi¬
cient sharing of values between North and South to make Clay’s
appeal practicable, and by 1861, there would be none at all.

Even if Clay had lived until 1861, and had been preternaturally
restored to vigor and political influence, it is doubtful that he could
have prevented the schism of the Republic. His failure did not pro¬
ceed from his defects but from his virtues, primarily from his un¬
shakable, almost childlike, faith in the residual allegiance of North
and South to the common Union. In Clay’s political vision the United
States — and perhaps human society in general — was composed of
constantly competing interests — sections, classes, economic and
political blocs — that balanced each other and mutually limited the
power of any one of them. It was a Madisonian conception, ex¬
pressed in Federalist 51, and Clay more than once hailed Madison
as his hero and guide in political thought. But Clay also believed that
these separate interests shared a common attachment to the Union,
and it was this common denominator that created them a single
family, a band of brothers, and gave them the basis for reconcilia¬
tion, compromise, and harmony. It was the impossibility of realiz¬
ing perfect justice in an imperfect world, the disastrous conse¬
quences that would follow an attempt by imperfect human nature to

23. Sec David Potter, The Impending Crisis , 1848-1861 (New York: Harper and
Row, 1976), 108-9, for this interpretation and for the foregoing account of the back¬
ground of the Compromise of 1850.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

57

formulate absolute solutions to public issues, that led him to take his
stand, irrevocably, upon the balance of factions and the statecraft of
circumstance.

Yet Clay was unable to give a content to his ideal of the Union in
any but pragmatic and material terms. He appealed to the economic
interests of the composite factions, yet there arose issues for each of
them that transcended economics. He appealed to the military dan¬
gers of disunion, yet he was unable to identify a convincing enemy,
and, as the sectional dispute over expansion developed, one sus¬
pects that he feared to push the appeal too far. The threat of a com¬
mon enemy might too easily have translated into a rationalization
for expansion that would upset the sectional balance even further.
Finally, Clay appealed to the negative of his proposition: what would
happen if the different interests did not unite? The abolition of slav¬
ery would lead to racial as well as to civil war; the country would
succumb to its foreign enemies; national prosperity would sink into
poverty.

But, though Clay was successful in his earlier years in forging
compromises that avoided asking the unanswerable questions, he
was unable to find a formula that would answer, for all sides, the
fundamental question: why should the Union stay together? As dif¬
ferent parts of the country began to settle on different goals, and
with different rationales for seeking those goals, this question be¬
came more and more unanswerable. Clay’s pragmatism was incapa¬
ble of finding a moral unity among these sections, and it was, in
different ways, moral unity that the abolitionists and the secession¬
ists each finally created for themselves. When they had formed their
own purposes within the Union, when the abolitionists had settled
on emancipation and the South had determined on slavery, as the
goals around which they would stand or fall, there was no longer
any moral or even any material basis for mutual concessions or for
allegiance to a common nation. There was only the prospect of dis¬
solution or of domination by one section or the other.

Thus Clay was philosophically unable to bring the two sides to¬
gether. Had he been able to discover a common loyalty or a public
orthodoxy that really encompassed the whole country, and not one
that merely tried to satiate the appetites of each part, he might have
realized his life’s ambition to be president and to create a common

58

Beautiful Losers

national purpose. The “love of subduing” that Miss Greenwoods
chaperon saw in him in his later years was doomed to frustration.
His efforts at compromise came to be regarded as merely oppor¬
tunist fence-straddling precisely because he gave no attention to
those fundamental principles that he distrusted and on which all
others were becoming fixated.

Yet the flaw of Clays statecraft of circumstance was not his alone.
The Madisonian model of checks and balances, formalized in the
Constitution and enshrined in the claims of political liberalism, of¬
fers no brake by which the perpetual motion of sectional and social
conflict can be controlled and reconciled, and neither Clay nor any
of his contemporaries can be blamed too much for failing to find or
create such a brake. The United States, from its origins as a political
society, recognized no such restraint, and it stepped forth into his¬
tory in the delusion that none is necessary, that balance and com¬
promise through the mutual gratification of economic interests are
as natural and stabilizing in society and politics as in the celestial
mechanics of the Newtonian universe the Framers inhabited.

In the absence of some common myth — religious, ethical, ideo¬
logical. national, or racial — that could serve as a framework by which
individual and sectional appetites could be governed, and relying
solely on a supposititious balance of selfish but enlightened inter¬
ests, the Republic sooner or later was destined to suffer either dis¬
solution from the centrifugal conflicts those interests engendered
or centripetal domination by one or another of the strongest of them.
During Clay’s lifetime, a balance did indeed endure that permitted
the efflorescence of an American civilization and republican liberty
through the mutual contributions and antagonisms of different sec¬
tions, subcultures, classes, and economies. But that balance was an
accident of history, not a law of nature. At the end of Clay’s life, it
was beginning to disappear as subordinate sections began to define
themselves as separate civilizations in their own right, and not long
after Clay’s death, it broke asunder as the two contested for domi¬
nance over the Union. The flaw of Henry Clay, then, was not his
alone but that of the Republic he sought and failed to govern.

But even as he exited the national stage, there was already another
politician, to whom Henry Clay was “my beau ideal of a statesman.

Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance

59

the man for whom I fought all my humble life,”24 who could formu¬
late an orthodoxy of fundamental moral absolutes, however dubi¬
ous. The doctrine of acquisitive egalitarianism that Abraham Lin¬
coln asserted was not that of the Framers or the early Republic and
most certainly not that which Henry Clay assumed to be inherent in
the universe. It was, however, better suited to the satisfaction of the
libido dominandi and the winning of the presidency than anything
Clay had imagined, and Lincoln’s ambition, far more than Henry
Clay’s, was what the future president’s law partner called “a little
engine that knew no rest.”25

24. Quoted in Eaton, Henry Clay, 93-

25. Quoted in Shelby Foote, The Civil War. A Narrative, Fort Sumter to Per-
ryville (New York: Random House, 1958), 20.

Message from MARs

The Social Politics of the New Right

The label “New Right” is at best a confusing one. In the first place,
what the label represents is not entirely new, since many of its themes,
values, and interests have been expounded to one degree or another
by the Old Right of the 1950s and 1960s. In the second place, it is
not entirely “Right,” since other ideals and values associated with it
have seldom been expressed by conservatives of any generation. The
New Right is perhaps best known for its populism and its heated
contempt for elitism and “limousine liberals.” Its polemical ex¬
changes with the Left (and even, sometimes, with the Right) often
display a bitterness that was lacking in the amiable sparring bouts of
Mr. Buckley and Professor Galbraith. Moreover, the New Right voices
no small amount of antibusiness (not to say anticapitalist) rhetoric.
Bankers, multinational corporations, Big Business, and The Rich
occupy a distinct circle in the New Right vision of the Inferno. The
symbols of wealth are also important in its demonology: the Ivy
League, the country club, and the Trilateral Commission. Orthodox
conservatives of the Old Right generally deprecate, smile at, or strain
themselves ridiculing such gaucherie.

Yet, if the New Right is often the victim of its own rhetoric, it can,
in 1980, lay claim to something that the Old Right can never claim.
Political commentators will no doubt debate for years whether the
Republican capture of the White House and Senate in 1980 was or
was not due to New Right efforts alone, but they have never de¬
bated, and never will, whether the Old Right elected Barry Gold-
water in 1964 — or Robert Taft in 1952 — or Herbert Hoover in 1932.
The New Right in 1981, and for some years to come, has what the
Old Right could never claim: a national constituency, and the clear
possibility of political victory, if not political dominance, in the
United States for the remainder of the century.

Despite the incoherence of its name and sometimes of its mes¬
sage, the New Right represents far more than a political ideology or
an electoral coalition. The New Right is the political expression of a

60

Message from MARs

61

profound social movement that reflects the dynamics of American
society and promises to dominate not only politically, but also per¬
haps socially and culturally. The origins of the New Right in a social
movement explain why its political message often appears to be
incoherent, contradictory, or simplistic. What the New Right has to
say is not premeditated in the inner sanctums of tax-exempt founda¬
tions or debated in the stately prose of quarterly or fortnightly jour¬
nals. The contents of its message are perceived injustices, unrelieved
exploitation by anonymous powers that be, a threatened future, and
an insulted past. It is therefore understandable that the New Right
has less use for the rhetorical trope and the extended syllogism than
for the mass rally and the truth squad and that some of its adherents
sometimes fantasize that the cartridge box is a not-unsatisfactory
substitute for the ballot box.

The social movement that the New Right expresses and whose
values, resentments, aspirations, and fears it tries to articulate is
composed of what sociologist Donald I. Warren calls “Middle Amer¬
ican Radicals” — MARs. This movement, in Professor Warren’s de¬
scription, is less an objectively identifiable class than a subjectively
distinguished temperament, yet it possesses verifiable features that
set it apart from other social groups and formations. In the mid-
1970s, MARs had a family income of three to thirteen thousand
dollars. There was a strong presence among them of northern Euro-
pean ethnics, although Italians tended to account for more MARs
than other groups. MARs were nearly twice as common in the South
as in the north-central states. They tended to have completed high
school but not to have attended college. They were more common
among Catholics and Jews than among Protestants and among Mor¬
mons and Baptists than among other Protestant sects. They tended
to be in their thirties or in their sixties and were “significantly less
likely to be professional or managerial workers” than to be “skilled
and semi-skilled blue collar workers.” 1

Yet these statistical features do not define MARs. What defines
them as a movement is an attitudinal quality, and what Warren finds
most distinctive of them is their view of government and, in a broader

1 . Donald I. Warren, The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of
Alienation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 19^6), 23-29.

62

Beautiful Losers

sense, of the “establishment” and their role in it. Unlike adherents
of the Left, MARs do not regard the government as favoring the rieh,
and, unlike adherents of the Right, they do not regard the govern¬
ment as giving too much to the poor. According to Warren,

MARs are a distinct group partly because of their view of government as
favoring both the rich and the poor simultaneously. . . . MARs are distinct in
the depth of their feeling that the middle class has been seriously neglected.
If there is one single summation of the MAR perspective, it is reflected in a
statement which was read to respondents: The rich give in to the demands
of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill. 2

This attitude is resonant with significant social and political im¬
plications. It points to a sense of resentment and exploitation, mainly
economic but also broader, that is directed upwards as well as down¬
wards. It points to distrust of decision-makers in state and economy
as well as to fear of the economically depressed. It points also to the
frustration of aspirations, to an alienation of loyalties, and to a suspi¬
cion of established institutions, authorities, and values.

The economic frustrations of MARs, as represented in the above
quotation, spill over into political, cultural, and moral expression.
The objective features of the MAR profile, coupled with awareness
of MAR political ferocity in New Right protests, from the antibusing
movements of the early 1970s to the Panama Canal and anti-ERA
mobilizations of 1977-1978, should substantiate the movement as
social rather than political in a narrow sense. MARs form a class —
not simply a middle class and not simply an economic category —
that is in revolt against the dominant patterns and structures of
American society. They are, in the broadest sense, a political class,
and they aspire, through the New Right, to become the dominant
political class in the United States by displacing the current elite,
dismantling its apparatus of power, and discrediting its political
ideology.

“Ruling classes,” wrote Gaetano Mosca, the great Italian political
scientist of the early twentieth century, “do not justify their power
exclusively by de facto possession of it, but try to find a moral and
legal basis for it, representing it as the logical and necessary conse¬
quence of doctrines and beliefs that are generally recognized and

2. Ibid., 20-21.

Message from MARs

63

accepted.”5 The current elite in the United States, which has held
both political and social power since the 1930s, is no exception. Its
ideology or political formula, by which it rationalizes its power, is
generally known as liberalism — a set of ideas and values that osten¬
sibly eschews power and upholds equality, liberty, and the broth¬
erhood of man, but which is amazingly congruent with and adapt¬
able to the political, economic, and social interests (the structural
interests) of the groups that espouse it.

This elite seized power in the political and economic crisis of the’
Great Depression. The chief instrument of its rise to power, then
and in the following decades, was the state, especially the federal
government, and more especially the executive branch. Through
the state, it made common cause with certain mass organizations —
large corporations, labor unions, universities, foundations, and the
media — and has generally favored their expansion and strengthen¬
ing at the expense of smaller-scale units. In domestic affairs it has
supported federally enforced economic planning and social engi¬
neering for the purpose (at least ostensibly) of realizing its liberal
ideology. In foreign affairs, it has favored international activism
through similar large-scale organizations and transnational alliances
that seem to promote global fraternity and the disappearance of
national distinctions and differences. In political theory it aban¬
doned the ideal of a neutral government based on impartial laws
and administering equal justice and associated itself with a concept
of the state as intimately involved in social and economic processes
and as an architect of desirable social change. This concept of the
state has been buttressed by a variety of pseudoscientific ideologies—
psychoanalysis, behaviorism, legal positivism, applied sociology,
Marxism manque, educational progressivism, etc. — most of which
are logically incompatible with liberalism but are nevertheless
abridged, distorted, and popularized into congruence with current
ideological fixations.

It is in its cultural and social ideologies and life-styles that the
new elite has developed what is probably the clearest indicator of

3. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (Elementi cli Scienza Politic a), ed. Arthur
Livingston, trans. Hannah I). Kahn (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1939),
70.

64

Beautiful Losers

its dominant position. The life-styles, aspirations, and values of the
current elite are bound together, rationalized, and extended by what
may be called the “cosmopolitan ethic.” This ethic expresses an
open contempt for what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons”
of human society — the small town, the family, the neighborhood,
the traditional class identities and their relationships — as well as for
authoritative and disciplinary institutions — the army, the police,
parental authority, and the disciplines of school and church. The
cosmopolitan ethic, reversing a Western tradition as old as Aesop,
finds virtue in the large city, in the anonymous (and therefore “liber¬
ated”) relationships of de-classed, de-sexed, demoralized, and de¬
racinated atoms that know no group or national identities, accept no
given moral code, and recognize no disciplines and no limits. The
ethic idealizes material indulgence, the glorification of the self, and
the transcendence of conventional values, loyalties, and social bonds.
At the same time, it denigrates the values of self-sacrifice, commu¬
nity, and moral and social order. Its most perfect (though extreme)
expression is perhaps Mick Jagger, but a more typical and vapid
form is portrayed in advertisements that tell us What Kind of Man
Reads Playboy.

The ideology or formula of liberalism grows out of the structural
interests of the elite that espouses it. Liberalism barely exists as an
independent set of ideas and values. Virtually no significant thinker
of this century has endorsed it. Internally, the doctrines of liber¬
alism are so contrary to established fact, inconsistent with each
other, and immersed in sentimentalism, resentment, egotism, and
self-interest that they cannot be taken seriously as a body of ideas.
Liberalism flourishes almost entirely because it reflects the material
and psychological interests of a privileged, power-holding, and
power-seeking sector of American society.

In the early twentieth century, the increasing massiveness of Amer¬
ican society appeared to demand new organizational forms of con¬
trol. The imperatives of mass scale in the economy, in government
and politics, and in social and cultural life gave rise to a new elite
that found its principal power base in bureaucracy. In both the pub¬
lic and private sectors, the bureaucratic organization of power and
control appeared to be the only means of ruling modern mass units.
In the private sector the evolution of bureaucratic dominance fol-

Message from MARs

65

lowed the “separation of ownership and control” in the large corpo¬
rations and took the form of managerial direction of large corporate
firms. In government, modern bureaucracy developed in a more
sudden and revolutionary way in the crisis of the Great Depression.
Yet there was no fundamental difference between the interests of
the bureaucrats of the public sector and those of the private sector.
Both bureaucratic realms shared a common mentality: a rationalistic
faith in administrative and manipulative techniques as a means of
holding and exercising power. Both sectors, perhaps more impor¬
tantly, shared certain common material interests: the more massive
the scale of organization, the more imperative the bureaucratic-
managerial form of organization and the more power and material
rewards that accrued to the elites that controlled such organiza¬
tions. The same or similar interests and imperatives pertained in all
mass-scale organizations, and the same dominant bureaucratic func¬
tions developed in control of the mass unions. Similarly, but more
recently, the media of mass communication (in almost every form —
book publishing, news reporting, entertainment, documentaries, etc.)
have displayed the same dynamic of elite formation, and, most re¬
cently, the instruments of legitimate force — the armed forces and the
larger metropolitan police departments — display it also. Unlike
the older, more localized and personal elites of American society,
the new elite possesses a more uniform mentality and a more homo¬
geneous interest: the expansion of mass units of organization under
the bureaucratic forms of governance, animated by an ideology of
manipulative, administrative social engineering.

From its very nature, therefore, the new elite found liberalism a
useful and indeed indispensable formula for rationalizing its exis¬
tence and power. Modern liberalism justified government on a mass
scale and bureaucratic manipulation of social and economic pro¬
cesses. Liberalism allowed for an economy led by mass corpora¬
tions, themselves governed by “progressive” executives whose posi¬
tions depended on merit and schooling in managerial sciences, and
not on inheritance, experience, or the virtues of the Protestant ethic.
Liberalism championed schooling itself, especially education (also
on a mass scale) that emphasized the practical disciplines of social
science, public administration, and modern business management.
Finally, liberalism, at its very center, articulated a vision of man that

66

Beautiful Losers

not only rationalized bureaucratic manipulation of the social envi¬
ronment but also laid the groundwork for the cosmopolitan ethic.
The great value of this ethic in the rise of the new bureaucratic elite
was its discrediting and delegitimization of the formulas and ide¬
ologies of its older rivals. Liberalism and cosmopolitanism were
able, through their immense appeal to an intelligentsia, to portray
localism and decentralized institutions as provincial and a mask for
bigotry and selfishness; the small town, the family, class, religious,
ethnic, and community ties as backward, repressive, and exploita¬
tive; the values of work, thrift, discipline, sacrifice, and postpone¬
ment of gratification (on which, as values, the moral legitimacy of
the older elites rested) as outmoded, absolutist, puritanical, super¬
stitious, and not infrequently hypocritical.

A more direct connection between the material interests of the
new elite and the semicollectivist ideology of liberalism exists also.
The mass economy of the twentieth century requires a mass level of
consumption for the financing of its productive capacities. Due to
the inability of lending institutions in the Great Depression to mobi¬
lize sufficient credit for the resumption of production, the federal
government undertook labor policies, transfer programs, and pen¬
sion policies designed to insure sufficient demand for the mass econ¬
omy to function. The immediate beneficiary of these policies, of
course, was the impoverished underclass of American society, but
the ultimate beneficiaries were the new managerial and bureaucratic
elites in corporation and government. The stimulation of demand
through government policy — a policy financed by middle-class tax¬
payers and consumers — insured the existence and dominance of the
mass organizations of government, corporation, and union and their
managerial elites. At the same time, this policy cemented an alliance,
not only among the different sectors of the new elite, but also be¬
tween the new elite as a whole and the proletariat of American soci¬
ety — against the remnants of the old elite and an exploited and
excluded middle class.4

4. The alliance of elite and underclass against the middle class — what I have here
called the “sandwich strategy” — has been noted by, among others, New Right politi¬
cal theorists Robert W. Whitaker, A Plague on Both Your Houses (Washington:
Robert B. Luce, 1976), chap. 4; and William A. Rusher, The Making of a New Major¬
ity Party (Ottawa, 111.: Cireen Hill Publishers, 1975), 33.

Message from MARs

67

The new elite, following a pattern that has been repeated many
times in human history, also found that the aggrandizement of the
federal executive branch was conducive to its revolution. The older
elites were based mainly in local and state governments and in the
Congress. The Caesarist political style of the new elite made use of
the presidency, under Roosevelt and Truman and their successors,
to attack, wear down, usurp, and discredit the authority and powers
of both state and local bodies and the Congress. In this new political
style, the rising managerial elite was following a pattern evident in
the careers of Pericles, Caesar, Henry Tudor, Louis XIV, and Napoleon
Bonaparte. Older elites, entrenched in established institutions, are
attacked by newer social formations that make alliances with charis¬
matic leaders exercising autocratic power and with an underclass
that receives material benefits expropriated from the old elite. New,
centralized institutions controlled by the new elite develop in place
of the localized institutions of the old rulers.

A pattern often associated with this “sandwich” attack on an old
elite by an alliance of an underclass and an autocrat who represents
an emerging elite is an activist and expansionist foreign policy led
by the new men in opposition to the passive, often isolationist pol¬
icies associated with the old ruling class. Thus, Pericles promoted
Athenian imperialism through enfranchisement of the lower-class
crews of the Athenian navy and against the interests of the landed,
inward-looking Attic oligarchy. Caesar s revolution in Rome, made
possible by his patronage of the lower classes, was to be extended in
imperial-military adventures in the East, but this was cut short by
his assassination. The Tudors, Louis XIV, and Napoleon all embarked
on expansionist foreign policies that sought to benefit the aspira¬
tions and interests of the new elites on which their own power was
based. The older elites oppose expansionism because their own
power bases are not equipped to profit from it and indeed are fre¬
quently threatened by the rise of new powers and forces in the newly
acquired territories.

This pattern also was present in the revolution of the managerial
elite of the depression-World War II era. The Old Guard of the
Republican party, representing the old elite, was isolationist in both
world wars. The new elite found both its economic and political
interests benefited by an activist, globalist foreign policy. The new

68

Beautiful Losers

political structures revolving around international and regional blocs,
new markets and trade arrangements, and new internal institutions
for international relations and conflict were all congruent with the
interests of the new elite in government, industry and finance, edu¬
cation, and labor.

It is against this elite — which Irving Kristol and others somewhat
belatedly call the “New Class” but which James Burnham more accu¬
rately (and much earlier) called the “managerial class”5 — that the
New Right with its MAR social base operates. It would be tenden¬
tious to claim that the ideologies and institutions of the managerial
elite are purely self-serving while claiming also that those of the
MARs are objectively true, public-spirited, in the general interest,
and morally pure. The MARs form a sociopolitical force now co¬
alescing into a class and perhaps into a new elite that will replace
the managerial elite. As a rising political class, the MARs have their
own interests, aspirations, and values, and these are not intended to
benefit the nation, society as a whole, or humanity. Nevertheless,
the structural interests of the MARs — what is of benefit to them
because of their position and functions in American society — may
be beneficial to America as well. The MARs, and similar social forces
now developing in the Sunbelt, promise a new dynamism in Amer¬
ica — economically as well as spiritually — in place of the now dec¬
adent and moribund managerial elite. They offer also a discipline, a
code of sacrifice for something larger than themselves, and a new
purpose that are beyond the reach of the jaded, self-indulgent, in¬
creasingly corrupt elite of the present day. The MARs are not better
or worse than other human beings in other social formations, but
the objective interests of their own formation appear to dictate a
social order quite different from, and probably better than, that
designed, manipulated, and misruled by the managerial class and its
cohorts.

5. See Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: New American Li¬
brary, 19^9), especially chap. 2. Kristols idea of the “New Class” is apparently lim¬
ited to the public sector and media and does not extend to large corporations. James
Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World { New York:
John Day Company, 1941), despite its age and problems, remains to my mind the
most accurate and comprehensive account of the New Class, its ideology, interests,
and dynamics. For a fuller discussion of the New Class, see B. Bruce-Briggs, ed., The
Sew Class? { New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Books, 1979).

Message from MARs

69

What the MARs and the New Right seek, then, is the overthrow of
the present elite and its replacement by themselves. This is a revolu¬
tionary goal, no less so than the goal of the rising managers of the
early part of the century. It is revolutionary not in the sense that its
realization will require violent rebellion, mass liquidation, or total¬
itarian rule — these are not envisioned by the New Right and would
be antithetical to MAR interests — but in the sense that the replace¬
ment of one elite by another almost always leads to a cultural renais¬
sance, to new and dynamic forces that alter ideas and institutions,
and to an efflorescence of material and spiritual life.

Yet the New Right will not be the spearhead of the Middle Ameri¬
can Revolution if it is concerned only with politics in its narrow,
formal sense. It must go beyond the tactics of electoral coalitions
and roll-call votes and develop a strategy for the seizure of real social
power. Real power is not limited to control of the formal apparatus
of government but extends to the levers by which human societies
are controlled — to the media of communication, the means of pro¬
duction, and the instruments of force. At the present time these
levers of social control and real social power are almost entirely
dominated by the managerial elite or are negated by it. Merely for¬
mal control of the political apparatus will not alter this fact. The
New Right-MAR coalition must seek to dismantle or radically reform
the managerial apparatus of social control, and this objective means
a far more radical approach to political conflict and to contempo¬
rary institutions. The strategic objective of the New Right must be
the localization, privatization, and decentralization of the manage¬
rial apparatus of power. Concretely, this means a dismantling of the
corporate, educational, labor, and media bureaucracies; a devolu¬
tion to more modest-scale organizational units; and a reorientation
of federal rewards from mass-scale units and hierarchies to smaller
and more local ones.

To include the large corporations in the “enemies list" of the New
Right may strike many adherents of the Old Right as odd or even as
subversive. Yet libertarians have long recognized that large, pub¬
licly owned, manager-dominated corporations have interests and
political orientations quite different from those of small, privately
owned and controlled enterprises. As G. William Domhoff, a radical
sociologist, has recognized,

70

Beautiful Losers

The businesspeople who were most isolationist, antiwelfare and antilabor
were more likely to be in NAM [National Association of Manufacturers] and
to be associated with smaller and more regional corporations. Those who
were more moderate [i.e., more liberal] were more likely to be in CED [Com¬
mittee for Economic Development] and to manage larger companies. More
recently, our study of the corporate interlocks of CED and NAM leaders
revealed the same large/small dichotomy. For example, NAM’s directors for
19”" 2 had only 9 connections to the top 25 banks, whereas CED had 63.
Similarly, NAM had but 10 connections to the 25 largest industrials, while
CED had 48. The findings were similar for insurance, transport, utilities and
retails.6

The present managerial elite, whether in the public or private sec¬
tor, has a vested interest in centralized decision making and collec¬
tive organization. The dynamic of MAR interests dictates ultimately
a policy of localization and privatization of real social power in both
the public and private sectors. Only by unleashing the now over¬
regulated, overtaxed, and unrewarded MAR social and economic
forces can their innovative and productive potential be developed.
This unleashing of MAR forces can come about only by dismantling
the managerial power structure.

To call the New Right “conservative,” then, is true only in a rather
abstruse sense. Its social and cultural values are indeed conservative
and traditionalist, but, unlike almost any other conservative group
in history, it finds itself not only out of power in a formal sense but
also excluded from the informal centers of real power. Consequently,
the political style, tactics, and organizational forms of the New Right
should find a radical, antiestablishment approach better adapted to
the achievement of its goals. Ideologically, much in the formulas
and theory (in so far as there is any) of the New Right derives from
exponents of the Old Right. Yet the premise of almost all Old Right
publicists has been that the values and institutions they were de¬
fending were part of an establishment that was under revolutionary
attack. For much of the period in which the Old Right flourished,
this premise was correct. Today, however, and since at least the mid

6. G. William Domhoff, The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling-Class Domina¬
tion in America (New York: Random House, 1978), 85; see also John Chamberlain,
The New Enterprising Americans,” Policy Review, No. 13 (Summer 1980): 36, on
' the preponderance of small-scale Middle Western enterprisers on the board of trust¬
ees” of conservativ e Hillsdale College, Michigan, and their criticism of Big Business.

Message from MARs

71

1960s, the revolution of mass and managers has triumphed, en¬
trenched itself as a new elite, and indeed has revealed strong signs
of ossification and decadence. The Old Right failed to arrest the
revolution mainly because it lacked an adequate social base. Its
powerful, well-honed, but esoteric critique of liberal ideology
appealed to few save the most sophisticated intellectuals and the
declining entrepreneurial elite whose interests and values were
reflected in conservative theory.

The New Right must consciously abandon much of the inertial
conservatism of its Old Right premises. It must cease congratulating
itself on its ability to raise money and win elections within the sys¬
tem developed by the present establishment and begin to formulate
a strategy for besieging the establishment. With its MAR social base,
the New Right is in a strong position to develop such a strategy, and
there are signs it is doing so. Some New Right groups have success¬
fully politicized sections of American society. Smaller businessmen,
broadcasters, clergy, parent groups, and other institutional repre¬
sentatives have played an active and important role in New Right
political campaigns. However, a key element in the success of the
New Right will be its ability to focus on how the establishment uses
its apparatus of power in the media, corporations, schools, etc., for
political domination and exploitation. This has been made reason¬
ably clear with regard to the bureaucracy and the unions, but other
institutional supports of the liberal managerial elite need exposure
as well.

In economics, the Old Right has consistently defended the free
market. While there is much to be said for the renaissance of free
market ideas led by Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Havek, Milton Fried¬
man, Arthur Laffer, and others, it is doubtful that the MAR coalition
and its allies in the Sunbelt’s entrepreneurial regions will continue
to focus on this classical liberal principle. It is more likely that MAR-
Sunbelt interests require a strong governmental role in maintaining
economic privileges for the elderly and for unionized labor (where
it now exists), that they will also require (or demand) subsidization
of construction and perhaps of characteristic Sunbelt enterprises
(energy, defense and aerospace industries, and agriculture). One
New Right tactic would be payment of these subsidies and priv¬
ileges out of the proceeds of taxing the Frostbelt and reorienting

72

Beautiful Losers

economic policy and legislation toward the South and West. For the
New Right to embrace such a tactic openly (as well as a more favor¬
able attitude toward protectionism) would be a frank recognition
that the classical liberal idea of a night-watchman state is an illusion
and that a MAR elite would make use of the state for its own interests
as willingly as the present managerial elite does. MAR resentment of
welfare, paternalism, and regulation is not based on a profound faith
in the market but simply on the sense of injustice that unfair welfare
programs, taxes, and stifling regulation have bred. The central focus
of MAR-New Right political economy is likely to be economic
growth, a value often confused with, sometimes encompassing, but
not identical to the free market.

Clearly, economic growth involves the lifting of most legal and
administrative restraints on enterprise — the demise of environmen¬
talist legislation, OSHA, the sale of federally owned land in the Far
West, etc. But it would also include government assistance to dy¬
namic but underfed sectors of the economy — e.g., the space pro¬
gram and new technology forms. The role of government in stim¬
ulating growth is no less inconsistent with free market ideals than
its role in retarding growth, and since the social forces of the New
Right would have a strong interest in the former role, there is little
value in their adherence to a strict laissez-faire ideology.

The promotion of a “no-growth” cultus by powerful elements of
the current liberal managerial elite is strong evidence of its dec¬
adence and ossification. The “selective isolationism” in foreign pol¬
icy, the withdrawal from the Third World and the conflict with the
Soviets, and the guilt experienced for our past foreign policy are
also indications of decadence. The fundamental reason for the fall
of Vietnam, the U.S. retreat from Angola, the betrayal of Somoza,
the desertion of Taiwan, and the collapse of the Shah (as well as the
weakening of our commitments to other Third World allies) lies in
the inability of our present elite to deal effectively with the often
brutal realities of the Third World, in the failure of the liberal for¬
mulas of the elite to rationalize necessary and desirable policies for
dealing with these realities, and in a preference by the elite to deal
with other elites similar to itself in developed regions (Japan, West¬
ern Europe, and the Soviet Union). The rationalistic, administrative,
and technical skills on which the power of the managerial class is

Message from MARs

73

based are of little value in underdeveloped regions, especially where
violent resistance to planning and manipulation requires a more
coercive response than managerial ideology can justify.

Moreover, the material interests of the elite, as well as its psychic
interests and ideological orientation, impel it toward the developed
world. Ideologically, the current elite distrusts nationalism and fa¬
vors internationalist and regionalist units of organization (the United
Nations, the Common Market, the British Commonwealth, the At¬
lantic Community, etc.). This preference is in accord with its cos¬
mopolitan ethic, but it also is consistent with the economic inter¬
ests of the large corporate entities. Free trade, the integration of in¬
ternational markets, and the stabilization of international relations
all reflect the interests of the transnational elites that dominate in
the developed countries. In contrast, smaller producers situated in
the Sunbelt require protection against cheap imports and access to
the raw materials and resources of the Third World, and they are
less committed to international stability than to the continued pre¬
dominance of the United States.

The foreign policy of the New Right, then, reflecting the interests
and values of its MAR-Sunbelt-neo-entrepreneurial base, is likely to
endorse a new nationalism that insists on the military and economic
preeminence of the United States, on international activism (and
even expansionism) in world affairs, on at least some measure of
protection for domestic producers, and for more resistance to Third
World arrogance, aggression, and barbarism. The controversy over
the Trilateral Commission, whatever its merits, reflects this conflict
over foreign policy between the social forces of the dominant elite
and those of the New Right. The commission is essentially the forum
of the elite and its multinational components; as such, it has become
a symbol of the resentments of MARs and the forces of the Sunbelt."
Moreover, the nationalism of the New Right will probably replace
the anticommunism of the Old Right as a focus of foreign policy.
While the Soviet Union, Cuba, and their allies remain the principal
threat to the United States and our predominance, New Right ele¬
ments are likely to focus on the threat itself rather than the ideologi-

7. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, “Another Trilateral Election?” Nation 0une 28,
1980): 783-84.

74

Beautiful Losers

cal origins of the threat. The distinction between the nationalist
focus of the New Right and the anticommunist orientation of the
Old became clear in the opposition to the Panama Canal Treaty.
While Old Right anticommunists sought to portray Panamanian
dictator Omar Torrijos as a Marxist, this was a far less effective
tactic than Ronald Reagan’s New Right, nationalist slogan on the
canal — “We built it, we paid for it, and it’s ours.”

The nationalism of the New Right points to what is perhaps its
best-known characteristic, the rejection of the cosmopolitan ethic
of the managerial elite and a thunderous defense of moral and social
traditionalism. The most offensive component of cosmopolitanism
to MARs is its abstract universalism, its refusal to make any distinc¬
tions or discriminations among human beings. The brotherhood of
man, egalitarianism, the relativization of moral values, and the re¬
jection of conventional social and cultural identities as obsolete and
repressive all derive from this universalist tendency. In its place, the
central formula of the rising MAR-Sunbelt elite is likely to form
around what may be called a domestic ethic that centers on the
family, the neighborhood and local community, the church, and the
nation as the basic framework of values. The values associated with
the domestic ethic will contrast sharply with those of cosmopoli¬
tanism: the duty of work rather than the right of welfare; the value
of loyalty to concrete persons, symbols, and institutions rather than
the cosmopolitan dispersion of loyalties; and the social and human
necessity of sacrifice and deferral of gratification rather than the
cosmopolitan-managerial demand for immediate gratification, in¬
dulgence, and consumption. The domestic ethic may also lay the
basis for a more harmonious relationship between employer and
worker, since the place of work itself can be portrayed as an institu¬
tion no less central than the family or the local community. The
common interest of workers and employers in opposing the restric¬
tive, stagnationist policies of the managerial elite is one element of
New Right rhetoric that could develop into this harmony, and the
explicit approach to blue-collar workers by recent New Right candi¬
dates appears to confirm this trend.

Out of the structural interests and residual values of the MARs,
and similar forces in the Sunbelt and in new entrepreneurial forces
throughout the country, the New Right can construct a formula or

Message from MARs

75

ideology. This formula will reflect the demands for economic growth,
a more aggressively nationalistic foreign policy, and an assertion of
traditionalist ethics and loyalties. It will not be conservative although
it will encompass some ideas of the Old Right and reject others. It
will, in fact, be a radical formula, demanding changes not only in
the formal appearance of power but also in the realities of the dis¬
tribution and uses of power in its social forms. As a radical move¬
ment, representing rising social forces against an ossified elite, the
New Right must abandon the political style of the Old Right. That
style, based on the premise that the Old Right represented an estab¬
lishment, sought to defend the intermediary institutions against the
Caesarist, leveling forces of the new managerial elite. The manage¬
rial class, however, has long since become the establishment and
shows signs of abandoning the executive branch as a spearhead of
its power-seizure. The New Right, therefore, should make use of the
presidency as its own spearhead against the entrenched elite and
should dwell on the fact that the intermediary bodies — Congress,
the courts, the bureaucracy, the media, etc. — are the main supports
of the elite. The adoption of the Caesarist tactic by the New Right
would reflect the historical pattern by which rising classes ally with
an executive power to displace the oligarchy that is entrenched in
the intermediate bodies.

Jeffrey Hart has suggested this idea of a New Right-Caesarist style
based on the presidency, but apparently without attracting broad
support.8 While the New Right can expect to make gains in Con¬
gress and state and local governments, only the presidency — as Nixon
and Agnew showed — has the visibility and resources to cut through
the intractable establishment of bureaucracy and media to reach the
MAR social base directly. Only the presidency is capable of disman¬
tling or restructuring the bureaucratic-managerial apparatus that
now strangles the latent dynamism of the MAR-Sunbelt social forces.
The key to this Caesarist strategy is that the New Right does not now
represent an elite but a subelite, that it must acquire real social power
and not preserve it in its current distribution. The intermediate in¬
stitutions of contemporary America — the bureaucracy, the media,

8. Jeffrey Hart, “The Presidency: Shifting Conservative Perspectives?” National
Review (November 22, 1974): 135 1-55.

76

Beautiful Losers

the managerial hierarchies of the mass unions and corporations, the
universities and foundations, the urban conglomerates — are not
allies of the New Right and are not conservative influences except in
the sense that they serve to protect established powers. Hence, the
New Right should not defend these structures but should expose
them as the power preserves of the entrenched elite whose values
and interests are hostile to the traditional American ethos and as
parasitical tumors on the body of Middle America. These structures
should be levelled or at least radically reformed, and only the presi¬
dency has the power and the resources to begin the process and to
mobilize popular support for it.

The characterization of the New Right presented in this essay is
unconventional and will perhaps be controversial. The New Right is
not merely an electoral coalition concerned with winning elections
and roll calls; it is the political expression of a relatively new social
movement that regards itself as the depository of traditional Ameri¬
can values and as the exploited victim of the alliance between an
entrenched elite and a ravenous proletariat. Viewed in this sociopo¬
litical perspective, the New Right is not a conservative force but a
radical or revolutionary one. It seeks the displacement of the en¬
trenched elite, the discarding of its ideology of liberalism and cos¬
mopolitanism, and its own victory as a new governing class in Amer¬
ica. The New Right is able to aspire to these ambitions because,
unlike the Old Right, it has a viable social base in the Middle Ameri¬
can Radicals and in the dynamic economy of the Sunbelt.

If the New Right is not conservative, it should be clear that it will
need a new ideology, formula, or political theory that can win the
loyalties and represent the interests of its social base and rationalize
its quest for social and political power. The primary justification of
its quest for power must be the corruption, decadence, incompe¬
tence, oppressiveness, and alienation of the old elite that it is seek¬
ing to displace. This elite — identified here as the managerial class
that rose to power in the government bureaucracy, large corpora¬
tions, and other modern mass-scale organizations since the 1930s —
is clearly foreign to the bulk of the nation in its life-style, values, and
ideals. Yet these life-styles, values, and ideals cannot be simply dis¬
carded by the old elite; they represent a logical outgrowth of its own

Message from MARs

77

structural interests: large, social engineering government in alliance
with corporations, universities and foundations, the mass media,
unions, and other bureaucracies. Only the cosmopolitan ethic and
liberal ideology described above can rationalize these structural
interests of the entrenched elite. The fundamental problem is not
the ethic or ideology of the elite but the elite itself, and it is the elite
and its apparatus of power that must be the main targets of New
Right attack.

The principal values to which the New Right should appeal in this
attack differ from those defended by the Old Right as well as from
those articulated by the managerial elite. In place of the free market
of the Old Right or the “stabilization” of the present elite, the New
Right should center its economic aspirations on the concept of eco¬
nomic growth. Clearly, the concept of growth involves a disman¬
tling of bureaucracy, regulation, fiscal and environmentalist policies,
and a decentralization and privatization of economic forces, but this
reorientation toward a freer economic climate is incidental to the
central idea of economic growth, expansion, and dynamism. In place
of the strictly anticommunist foreign policy of the Old Right or the
selective isolationism of the decadent managerial class, the New
Right should assert a foreign policy founded on a new activist and
expansionist nationalism — a policy that would necessarily encom¬
pass Old Right anticommunism but would also respond to rising
noncommunist threats. In place of the hedonistic, pragmatist, rela¬
tivist, and secularized cosmopolitanism of the present elite, the New
Right should expound without compromise the ideals and institu¬
tions of the American ethos: hard work and self-sacrifice, morally
based legislation and policies, and a public commitment to religious
faith. In place of the faith in congressional supremacy and estab¬
lished intermediary institutions that characterizes both the Old Right
and the entrenched managerial elite, the New Right will favor a
populist-based presidency able to cut through the present oligarchi¬
cal establishment and to promote new intermediary institutions
centered on Middle America.

The conflict into which the New Right is entering is a complex
one. Because of its complexity, the political expression of the MARs
cannot take forms that are entirely consistent in ideology or calcu¬
lated to please everyone within its own ranks. Because the issues

78

Beautiful Losers

and values are real and not the product of abstract cerebration, there
will probably be no monolithic movement under the New Right
aegis. There will be a coalition that will often find itself split, and
the opponents of the New Right will of course seek to take advan¬
tage of these splits. Hence, the political movement requires, more
than is customary in American political history, a discipline, a lead¬
ership, and a formula that will promote its cohesion, its electoral
advantages, and its objectives.

The late Carroll Quigley argued that new civilizations form them¬
selves around dynamic, innovative social forces, which he called
“instruments.” As these instruments develop, they acquire vested
interests that retard their dynamism and slow their innovative ca¬
pacities. The instruments then become ossified “institutions” that
oppose the rise of new forces and. unless challenged, lead to civi-
lizational decay.9 The managerial elite as described in this essay
began its history as an “instrument” and is now in a stage of what
Quigley would call “institutionalization.” In its youth it was a force
for much innovation, expansion, and cultural dynamism. In its se¬
nescence it is a force only for itself and for the cultivation of self-
indulgence, both material and psychological. Its power is being
challenged by a new force, also described above; if victorious, no
doubt the MARs themselves will exploit their rivals and, like all
men, have much to answer for. No doubt also the new elite that they
will form will someday degenerate and itself be challenged by new
dynamic forces. But the choice between the present elite and its
challengers is not merely between one power and another. It is a
choice between degeneration and rebirth, between death and sur¬
vival, for survival is not a right or a gift freely granted by the powers
that be. Survival, in the jungle or in political societies, is a hard-won
prize that depends ultimately on power itself. In this world, wrote
Goethe, one must be the hammer or the anvil. The essence of the
message from MARs is that the messengers want to work the forge.

9. Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Histor¬
ical Analysis (New York: Macmillan Company, 1961), ^3-74.

Prophet of the Heartland

The conservative movement in the United States has come a long
way, politically and intellectually, since the death of Willmoore Ken¬
dall in 1967. Although the successes of conservatism could not easily
have been predicted in the early 1960s, when Kendall’s thought
flourished, they would not have surprised him, for it was the essence
of his political thought that the American people were profoundly
committed to conservative principle and deeply hostile to liber¬
alism and ideological experimentation with their lives and govern¬
ment. On the other hand, certain recent trends in conservative
thought and politics — a seeming preoccupation with “respectabil¬
ity” and “credibility” and an inclination to dilute the expression of
its commitments in return for acceptance by the establishment —
would surely have angered him. Kendall called himself an “Appala-
chians-to-the-Rockies patriot,”1 and he was both temperamentally
and philosophically incapable of living in peace with the dominant
structures of the Northeast. Nor, were he living today, would Ken¬
dall have been silent about such trends. In his last years he was
working on a book that was to deal with the contemporary “sages”
of the renaissance of conservative thought in the 1950s (Russell Kirk,
James Burnham, and William F. Buckley, Jr., among others), and what
we know of this project suggests that he had some critical, even
unkind, things to say about his colleagues. There is a legend about
Kendall that at National Review he was never on speaking terms
with more than one associate at any one time. He was not a man to
allow personal friendship to stand in the way of what he took to be
philosophical truth and political rectitude, nor would he have permit¬
ted political success to deflect his perception of truth and rightness.

Kendall’s understanding of what constitutes conservatism is often
described as “populist,” and it is true that the persistent theme
throughout most of his work is that the locus of political virtue in

1. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since
1945 (New York: Basie Books, 1976), 2^2.

79

80

Beautiful Losers

the United States resides in the American people and is expressed in
their majority will through the deliberate processes of the Constitu¬
tion. Only in his last years did he incline to the view that a “select
minority” must keep the people virtuous, and to the natural rights
theory put forward by Leo Strauss. Despite these flirtations, the
characteristic of Kendall’s political thought is his unrelenting de¬
fense of the historic mainstream, the heartland, of American society
against a radical and basically un-American establishment, and the
value of his ideas for political conservatism today is that they offer a
framework for attacking the establishment. It is likely that Kendall,
a Rhodes Scholar and Ivy League professor, knew the temptations of
celebrity and accommodation to which intellectuals, whether con¬
servative or not, are particularly susceptible and that that is why his
polemics with his conservative colleagues were so fierce and his
criterion of true conservatism so strict.

Yet if his standard was strict, it was not narrow. It was not Ken¬
dall’s intention to exclude from conservative ranks everyone but
himself, and indeed much of his criticism of rival conservative theo¬
rists dwelled on what he took to be their own idiosyncratic, dog¬
matic, and narrow doctrines that effectively ostracized everyone
but themselves. “I make no sense,” he wrote,

of calling “Conservative” the man who takes a dim view of his country’s
established institutions, feels something less than at home with its way of life
as it actually lives it, finds it difficult to identify himself with the political
and moral principles on which it has acted through its history, dislikes or
views with contempt the generality of the kind of people his society pro¬
duces, and — above all perhaps — dissociates himself from its Founders, or at
least holds them at arms’ length.2

Indeed, the key to Kendall’s thought is contained in the phrase
about a “country’s way of life as it actually lives it.” “All political
societies,” he wrote,

all peoples, but especially I like to think our political society, this “ people of
the United States," is founded upon what political philosophers call a con¬
sensus ; that is, a hard core of shared beliefs. Those beliefs that the people

2. Willmoorc Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Chicago: Henry Regnery
Company, 1963), ix.

Prophet of the Heartland

81

share are what defines its character as a political society, what embodies its
meaning as a political society, what, above all perhaps, expresses its under¬
standing of itself as a political society, of its role and responsibility in his¬
tory, of its very destiny.3

It was in terms of the “way of life,” or public orthodoxy, of a coun¬
try, its ethos, identity, or consensus, that Kendall defined conser¬
vatism, the disposition, articulated by intellectuals or not, to defend
and conserve the fundamental identity of a society, including its
political institutions and government. It was because of this way of
life and the threats presented to it by its enemies that congressional
committees for the investigation of activities outside and hostile to
it were justified. It was because of the existence of the public ortho¬
doxy that Kendall understood that the United States is not an “open
society,” a society that remains officially and perpetually uncom¬
mitted to all principles and values and suspends judgments as to
whether some principles are true or false, but rather a society that
holds, as Kendall put it, “at the very moment of its birth,” the truth
of some principles to be self-evident and is therefore closed to the
serious consideration of, or even to very much tolerance for, princi¬
ples and parties that challenge such publicly acknowledged truths.
And it is because of the way of life of a society that those who claim
“rights” and drastic alterations in law and government from a soci¬
ety in which such claims are hitherto unknown are not only out of
line with its fundamental ethos and identity but also are, implicitly
or explicitly, proposing to change or even to destroy the society.

To understand conservatism as “a country’s way of life as it actu¬
ally lives it” is to reject those versions of conservative thought that
depend upon abstract principles, to which a society should con¬
form in its institutions and policies. Thus Kendall rejected the for¬
mulations advanced by libertarians, who identify the principle of
individual freedom as the abstraction to which our way of life should
accord, as well as those of Christian conservatives who, like Frank S.
Meyer, argued that “the Christian understanding of the nature and
destiny of man is always and everywhere what Conservatives strive
to conserve.” These principles were included in the traditional Amer¬
ican way of life but were not the whole of it, and as part of the whole

3. Ibid., 74.

82

Beautiful Losers

they acquired a meaning different from the meaning they acquired
in abstraction. By themselves, these principles are at best only par¬
tial visions of the way of life, and their defenders have extracted
them from a selective reading of various documents and events in
the nation’s history that ignores the mainstream of that history, of
how the country actually lives its way of life.

Yet alternative concepts and definitions of conservatism were not,
to Kendall, the main problem. Such alternatives were not in them¬
selves powerful enough to threaten the public orthodoxy signifi¬
cantly. The principal threat came from liberalism and what Kendall
called the "Liberal Revolution,” a crusade against the traditional be¬
liefs and practices of the United States that, through the presidency,
the executive bureaucracy, the courts, and the institutions of educa¬
tion and the mass media, had declared war against the public ortho¬
doxy, intended to destroy it, and planned to substitute an alterna¬
tive design in its place. The central principle to which liberalism
adheres and which is the foundation of its social and political design
is egalitarianism:

Liberal proposals do involve a common principle — one moreover which,
once you grasp it clearly, appears on the face of it as revolutionary because it
looks to the overthrow of an established social order. The principle in ques¬
tion is the egalitarian principle. ... It says that men are not merely created
equal, are indeed not created equal at all, but rather ought, that is have a
right, to be made equal. That is to say equalized, and equalized precisely by
governmental action, so that if they end up other than actually equal — in
political power, in wealth, in income, in education, in living conditions — no
one shall ever be able to say that government has spared any effort that might
conceivably have made them equal. 4

Ostensibly founded on the equality clause of the Declaration of
Independence, liberal egalitarianism appeals to a selective, false,
and distorted interpretation of the American way of life in order to
justify its imposition of equality. This appeal to a false tradition is a
necessary political tactic for liberalism, for if it appealed to the real
sources of egalitarian ideology — ideas that have nothing to do with
and in fact postdate the formation of the United States as a political
order — it would expose itself as an alien and revolutionary force.

t. Ibid., l^-is.

Prophet of the Heartland

83

Kendall viewed liberalism as literally revolutionary in the threefold
sense that

give the Liberals their way and the American social order will not bear even a
cousinly resemblance to that which is traditional among us; revolutionary,
because the revolution must go on and on forever, since if you are in the
business of making people equal there is and can be no stopping-place; revo¬
lutionary, finally, because the job cannot be done by a government of limited
powers — any more, to use James Burnham’s phrase, than you can use an
automobile to dig potatoes.5

To base conservatism on a defense of a way of life, a concrete and
historical manner of thinking and living, rather than on an adher¬
ence to various abstract ideals and principles, involves at least two
important presuppositions. First, Kendall’s view of conservatism
involved an understanding of American history and of its major
documents and events as incorporating and expressing the tradi¬
tional public orthodoxy. Although he did not live to complete the
full development of his interpretation of the American past, he fre¬
quently alluded to or expanded upon it in his articles and reviews,
and his interpretation is developed more fully in his posthumous
The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition , completed
by his friend and colleague George W. Carey.6 7 Thus, Kendall did not
share the liberal interpretation (increasingly common among some
conservatives today) that the Declaration of Independence called
for egalitarianism and the remolding of American institutions in
accordance with the doctrine of equality. The egalitarian principle
of liberalism, Kendall wrote, is

not the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence, which “holds”
merely that all men are created equal. That is, as I understand it, are created
with an equal claim to be treated as persons (though by no means necessarily
as equal persons), with an equal right to justice, and an equal right to live
under a government limited by law (and constitutionally excluded from con¬
cern with certain major spheres of human endeavor)."

5. Ibid., 18.

6. Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American
Political Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970).

7. Kendall, Conservative Affirmation, 17.

84

Beautiful Losers

Nor did Kendall share the liberal affection for Abraham Lincoln,
whom he regarded as a perverter of the American tradition, “dedi¬
cated ... to egalitarian reforms sanctioned by mandates emanating
from national majorities,”8 a dedication that Kendall regarded as
completely alien to and destructive of the constitutional tradition
and political thought of the Framers.

Kendall’s understanding of the public orthodoxy thus required
historical grounding in order to show that it was the country’s actual
way of life. And, for the public orthodoxy to retain its legitimacy, it
must be shown that the American people continue to live by its
norms. Failing this demonstration, Kendall’s “way of life” becomes
simply a form of political antiquarianism, a judgment of contem¬
porary political issues by the standard of what once was thought but
which now has been abandoned. Liberals also, because they profess
to take their principles from the democratic consent of the people
rather than from ideological abstractions, must claim popular
support for their policies. Hence they point to the “mandates” ob¬
tained by presidents as legitimizing the democratic character of
their policies.

Kendall’s response to the liberal claim to popular consent involved
a challenge to the criterion of presidential elections and the fiction
of the mandate as the sole standards by which liberals allow them¬
selves to be tested and an emphasis on the persistence of institutions
and beliefs that liberals oppose. Writing in the 1960s, Kendall pointed
to the inability of liberals to abolish the House Un-American Activi¬
ties Committee, the seniority system in Congress, and the electoral
college; the congressional defeat of President Kennedy’s proposals;
and the continuing control of Congress by basically conservative
elements. He was fond of pointing out that, despite much liberal
invocation of the “tradition” of freedom of speech in America, opin¬
ion polls, the actual history of censorship in the United States, and
the actual practices and beliefs of most Americans in regard to school
prayer, censorship, and tolerance for Communists showed a very
limited commitment to the “open society.” “One begins to suspect,”
he wrote, “that the true American tradition is less that of our Fourth
of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks, with their

8. Ibid., 252.

Prophet of the Heartland

85

cluck-clucking over the so-called preferred freedoms, than, quite
simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail.”9

It is possible to criticize Kendall’s understanding of popular alle¬
giance to the public orthodoxy on the grounds that since he wrote
in the early 1960s the American people have significantly defected
from or have chosen to alter that orthodoxy. Congressional investi¬
gating committees were abolished in the 1970s, and it seems unlikely
that they will be restored to perform their traditional functions. The
seniority system has been reformed. If Kennedy’s programs were
rejected, those of Lyndon Johnson were enacted overwhelmingly,
and the counterculture and the New Left of the late 1960s have
apparently affected the way most Americans — even conservatives —
think about social, political, and moral issues and relationships.
Moreover, while Kendall was willing to grant liberalism its presi¬
dential claims, he insisted on the inherently conservative disposi¬
tion of the Congress. Since 1968, however, the American presidency
has displayed conservative inclinations that are well to the right of
what most members of Congress are willing to support. This devel¬
opment appears to contradict Kendall’s understanding of how the
electorate and its representatives manifest the political aspects of
the traditional public orthodoxy.

It is possible to circumvent many of these objections, however.
Many of the gains of the liberal revolution since Kendall’s death have
not been made through submission to the judgment of the American
people. They have been pushed through by the most undemocratic
institutions in the American system — the courts and the federal bu¬
reaucracy — and have been defended mainly by institutions that are
not at all responsive to popular control — the mass media and the
universities. The acceptance of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s
was based on a misunderstanding that conceived of civil rights as an
essentially moderate step. The social revolution implied in these
laws and in the movement that promoted them quickly became ap¬
parent, however, in efforts at forced busing, affirmative action, and
the continuing imposition of egalitarian reforms (as Kendall noted,
the revolution must go on and on forever). When these implications
became clear, the electorate overwhelmingly and resolutely rejected

9. Ibid., 82.

86

Beautiful Losers

them, and the efforts of conservatives since then have been directed
at finding ways in which civil rights laws could be denuded of their
radical consequences. Thus far, these efforts have not been very
successful.

Indeed, it is quite possible to argue that the whole political revival
of conservatism since 1980 is a confirmation of Kendalls central
contention that the American people remain faithful to the main
body of their traditional way of life and that politicians who pro¬
pose measures very far out of line with that orthodoxy are likely to
have short careers. The cast of Kendall’s conservatism was thus es¬
sentially optimistic, and he shunned the thought of pessimistic con¬
servatives who saw liberalism, retreat, and decadence as the domi¬
nant forces in the United States and the West. In its optimism and in
its reliance on popular confrontation with the liberal establishment,

then, Kendall’s ideas deserve to be better known among New Right
activists and strategists.

Yet Kendall emphasized the resistance of the mainstream to the
forces of liberalism, and he did not dwell on the institutional en¬
trenchments of liberalism in bureaucracy, universities, media, and
corporations. He did not live to suggest strategies by which the Amer¬
ican heartland can counterattack and regain the ground lost to these
encroachments, and there is little suggestion in most of his work
that there was any great need to reverse what liberals had, by the
1960s, succeeded in imposing. Kendall leaves the impression that
liberalism had succeeded in very little of its crusade. There is absent
from his thought the sense of apocalyptic catastrophe that is strongly
present in the thought of Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham.

Kendall’s optimism thus expresses a sense that the American pol¬
ity is basically sound and faces no challenge, internal or external,
that cannot be met within the framework of the traditional public
orthodoxy and traditional political institutions. One must wonder
today if he was correct in his optimism, which is too easily trans¬
muted into complacency. Are there not challenges, of both a mate¬
rial and spiritual nature, that the American people and their leaders
seem reluctant to recognize and meet? Americans no doubt remain
overwhelmingly anticommunist, but are they prepared to make the
sacrifices and to sustain the long-term commitments that the de¬
struction of aggressive, totalitarian empires demands? Americans

Prophet of the Heartland

87

remain deferential to and respectful of the legitimate and traditional
authorities of church, state, and the social order, but when these
authorities have been captured by radical forces that manipulate the
best instincts of the American people to dispossess them of their
heritage, does this deference and respect allow for the kind of mili¬
tancy that is needed?

The last decade has seen the proliferation of militant anti-liberal
groups and leaders that do reject the liberalism of the establish¬
ment, and this rejection is based upon an understanding of and
allegiance to a traditional public orthodoxy that underlies our na¬
tional institutions and values. Yet, as Kevin Phillips has suggested,
there is a danger that this “New Right” will be or has been co-opted
by a national political and intellectual leadership that neglects and
misunderstands its basis and which seeks to use it to gain the rewards
of the establishment rather than challenge it directly. While Will-
moore Kendall’s political thought remains indispensable for the
resurgence of a militant popular conservatism, it also contains little
that would justify a counterrevolution against the establishment,
and it is possible that Kendall exaggerated the counterrevolutionary
impulses that the mass of the American people harbor. Kendall would
surely have rejected any accommodation with the liberal establish¬
ment and would have sought to develop a theoretical framework for
a popular counterrevolution against it, but his untimely death at the
age of fifty-eight prevented him from developing such a framework
on a systematic basis. It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of American
conservative thought in the 1950s and 1960s that he did not live to
complete his work and to witness and comment upon the incipient
resurgence of the heartland that underlies the conservatism of the
1980s.

The Harmless Persuasion

Irving Kristol,

Reflections of a Neoconservative:

Looking Back , Looking Ahead

Irving Kristol is the most articulate, the most learned, and proba¬
bly the best known exponent of the body of ideas and opinions that
has come to be called neoconservatism, a label that Mr. Kristol,
unlike several other writers in this movement, accepts. His most
recent collection of essays and journalism is therefore a valuable
book, not only for its intrinsic merits of learning and style, but also,
since it does accept this label, because it may long serve as a repre¬
sentative text of what neoconservatism is and what its exponents
believe.

Although there is considerable overlap between neoconservatism
and the philosophical conservatism of the Old Right, the two are
distinct from each other both in their theoretical presuppositions
and practical applications as well as in their historical and political
origins. The Old Right, or, in George Nash’s phrase, the “conser¬
vative intellectual movement,” originated largely as a protest against
the statism of the New Deal, the internal and external threat of com¬
munism, and the danger to traditional institutions and values (in¬
cluding private property and its uses) presented by modern liber¬
alism in government, economy, and society. The Old Right in the
United States took its bearings from the American experience, espe¬
cially from the constitutional tradition, and was reinforced by Euro¬
pean thinkers such as Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, who drew at¬
tention to the medieval, classical, and biblical roots of the American
tradition. Socially, the Old Right tended to be Roman Catholic or
High Protestant in religion; German, Irish, or southern Celtic in
ethnic identity; and midwestern or southern in geographic and cul¬
tural roots.

Neoconservatism, on the other hand, originated in northeastern,
urban universities and periodicals in the late 1960s. Its exponents

88

The Harmless Persuasion

89

have been most notably Jewish and Eastern European in religious
and ethnic identity and urban, academic, and northeastern in ori¬
gins. The political impetus for neoconservatism was, first, the threat
to the integrity of universities and American intellectual life pre¬
sented by the militancy of the New Left and the barbarism of the
counterculture of the late 1960s; secondly, the threat to Jewish aca¬
demic and professional achievements in America presented by the
quotas and affirmative action programs of the Great Society; and
thirdly, the development of serious anti-Semitism on the Left and
the Soviet alliance with radical anti-Western and anti-Israeli Arab
regimes and terrorists. Like the prospect of being hanged, these
phenomena have tended to concentrate the Jewish mind wonder¬
fully. Historically associated with the liberalism and the Left in Amer¬
ican and European history, American Jews have moved demonstra¬
bly to the right in the past fifteen years, not only intellectually but
also politically. In 1980 Ronald Reagan won some 40 percent of the
Jewish vote.

The differences between the Old Right and the neoconservatives
in political origins and social composition largely account for the
differences in political style and values between the two movements.
The Old Right was anti-liberal as well as anticommunist; the neo¬
conservatives are noticeably reticent in their opposition to the wel¬
fare state and their critique of liberal ideology, and their anticom¬
munism is largely directed toward the Soviets and their surrogates
(Communist China is of far less importance to them than to the Old
Right). The Old Right was committed to conserving what it took to
be the unique historic identity of American society as a continua¬
tion of the Anglo-Saxon political tradition and the Western Euro¬
pean Christian tradition in social, moral, and aesthetic values. The
neoconservatives appear to have little interest in conserving the his¬
toric realities of the American tradition and indeed show little sym¬
pathy for the Christian heritage beyond a highly selective amalgam¬
ation of Judaism and Calvinist Protestantism.

In place of an appeal to the ancient norms of the Western and
American traditions, Mr. Kristol in these essays articulates a defense
of what he variously calls “bourgeois civilization,” the “commercial
society,” or “liberal capitalism.” The United States, for him. is the
embodiment of bourgeois civilization, the principles of which were

90

Beautiful Losers

first articulated by the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume,
Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith in distinction to the Continental
Enlightenment of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. “Out of the tradi¬
tions of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment,” Mr. Kristol tells us, “there
merged a sociopolitical order that defines an important epoch in
human history: the ‘bourgeois’ epoch, in which we Americans, at
any rate, still live, though with increasing unease.” Between the
American Revolution (which Mr. Kristol tends to see as the Anglo-
Scottish Enlightenment in arms) and the Founding on the one hand,
and the discontents of the 1960s and 1970s on the other, there is
barely any reference to American history in these essays. For Mr.
Kristol, American history as a concrete experience (as opposed to
an abstraction) appears not to exist or to be unimportant.

The bourgeois order that Mr. Kristol defends “roots itself in the
most worldly and common of human motivations: self-interest,”
and it “assumes that, though only a few are capable of pursuing
excellence, everyone is capable of recognizing and pursuing his own
self-interest.” Hence, bourgeois society is characterized by a cap¬
italist economy, a democratic-republican political order, and a lib¬
eral ethos that tolerates and legitimizes a high degree of private
differentiation (i.e., an “open society”). In its classic form, however,
bourgeois society is also characterized by what Mr. Kristol calls “re¬
publican morality” or “civic virtue,” a moral code that, while ac¬
knowledging the usefulness and value of material acquisition, im¬
poses an ethic of self-restraint on the bourgeoisie that prevents it
from degenerating into a collection of plutocrats and hedonists.
Bourgeois society, he says, is “the most prosaic of all possible socie¬
ties,” eschewing the heroic, the transcendent, and the romantic-
utopian, and the “bourgeois ideal is much closer to the Old Testa¬
ment than to the New — which is, perhaps, why Jews have felt more
at home in the bourgeois world than in any other.”

Yet Mr. Kristol’s defense of the bourgeois ideal and its institutions
is not total: “The attitude of neoconservatives to bourgeois society
and the bourgeois ethos is one of detached attachment” or of “mod¬
est enthusiasm” in recognition that “liberal-democratic capitalism”
is not the best of all imaginable worlds but “only the best, under the
circumstances, of all possible worlds.” He recognizes the flaws of
bourgeois society — what its enemies call philistinism — and its ten-

The Harmless Persuasion

91

dencies to degeneration, and his principal criticism of American
society today is that it has abandoned the republican morality that
the Anglo-Scottish theorists of the bourgeois ideal and their alleged
disciples, the Founding Fathers, took for granted. Mr. Kristol’s con¬
stant lament throughout these essays is that this moral code of bour¬
geois society has eroded. “The challenge to our urban democracy is
to evolve a set of values and a conception of democracy that can
function as the equivalent of the republican morality of yesteryear.
This is our fundamental urban problem.” Without a set of constrain¬
ing and directing values, bourgeois society degenerates under the
temptations of mass affluence. “Crime and all kinds of delinquency
increase with increasing prosperity. Alcoholism and drug addiction
also increase. Civic-mindedness and public-spiritness are corroded
by cynicism. . . . The emphasis is on the pleasures of consumption
rather than on the virtues of work . . . ‘fly now, pay later’ becomes,
not merely an advertising slogan, but also a popular philosophy of
life.”

Mr. Kristol is undoubtedly correct in his critique of the degenera¬
tion of the bourgeois order, but it is the irony of these essays (and
indeed of neoconservatism) that he nowhere suggests either a means
of restoring the moral code of a healthy republic or of formulating a
new code that would be viable for a postbourgeois society. He is
partially correct in suggesting that the defense of bourgeois society
distinguishes neoconservatism from “the Old Right and the Ncwt
Right — both of which are exceedingly suspicious of it.” As a social
and political movement, Old Right conservatism was an extension
and a defense of the bourgeois forces that came to dominate the
United States between the Civil War and the depression, but intel¬
lectually the “traditionalist” wing of the Old Right argued that Amer¬
ica was not, in its essence and origins, a bourgeois society and that
the Old World roots of the American order, manifested most clearly
in the traditional values and institutions of American society, pre¬
dated the ideals and disciplined the appetites of bourgeois forces.
Russell Kirk and the neo-Burkeans, Richard Weaver and the South¬
ern Agrarians, Triumph and the Catholic Right, and Leo Strauss and
his school argued with each other over the precise nature of the
American order, but all were equally critical of the modernist forces
that, from the Civil War to the Great Society, successfully subverted

92

Beautiful Losers

and redesigned that order. It is true, as Mr. Kristol claims, that there
is an element of nostalgia in Old Right political thought, and perhaps
it is true that the Old Right was impractical in much of its restora-
tionist critique. Yet the fact remains that the Old Right not only
formulated a far more sophisticated body of ideas than the neocon¬
servatives but also perceived the inherent weaknesses and tenden¬
cies of bourgeois society more profoundly than neoconservatism.

As Mr. Kristol acknowledges, “For many generations capitalism
was able to live off the accumulated moral and spiritual capital of
the past” but was unable to produce such capital itself. The “pro¬
saic” nature of bourgeois ideology and values was precisely the
reason for this failure, and it finally resulted in the disintegration of
the bourgeois ethos and the discontents of the present day. As Mr.
Kristol is also aware, the very material and organizational success of
bourgeois society led to the triumph of technocratic and bureau¬
cratic elites — what he calls the “corporate revolution” but which is
largely identical to what James Burnham much earlier called the
“managerial revolution” — and to the transvaluation of the “civic
virtue” of the early republic by the managerial ideologies of collec¬
tivism, social engineering, and mass hedonism. Mr. Kristol there¬
fore understands the flaws of bourgeois society and its ideologies,
but nowhere does he firmly argue that these flaws are inherent in
that society; nowhere does he develop a basis for resisting or reject¬
ing these flaws; and nowhere does he seem aware that the corrective
for them lies in the heartland of America, far from the northeastern
urban academies and salons where the bourgeois pathology is bred.
It is Mr. Kristol’s basic error that he exaggerates the importance of
bourgeois ideology in the revolution, the country’s founding, and
the American experience and thus, by portraying America as in the
main a bourgeois order, creates a selective and distorted picture of
our national identity. If, furthermore, America is and was in its ori¬
gins mainly a bourgeois society, then it contains no corrective for
the inherent degenerative tendencies of that order, and those who
wish to resist the mortal consequences of these tendencies must go
outside the American tradition.

Mr. Kristol may be correct that bourgeois society, “under the cir¬
cumstances,” is the best possible world, but it is not self-evident that
it will long remain possible at all. The ideological and institutional

The Harmless Persuasion

93

fabric of the bourgeois order has already been subverted by the
“New Class” of managers and verbalists in both the private and pub¬
lic sectors, and it is doubtful that a defense of bourgeois values will
appeal to many outside a dwindling and declining social class. If
there is a future for the American Right, it lies in the heartland of
Middle America, which is fundamentally neither bourgeois nor New
Class in its values and life-styles and which remains the only part of
contemporary American society capable of mobilizing “heroic” vir¬
tues and “transcendent” myths to overcome and correct our pres¬
ent distempers. In any case, Mr. Kristols lukewarm, circumstantial
endorsement of bourgeois society can do nothing to ensure its sur¬
vival. To paraphrase Whittaker Chambers, who can imagine a Marine
wading ashore at Tarawa with Reflections of a Neoconservative in
his pocket?

The most frequent criticism of neoconservatives by the Old and
New Right is that they are more “neo” than conservative and that,
when things come to the crunch, they retreat into elegant repri¬
mands of the establishment rather than advance to a principled con¬
frontation with it. This criticism is generally sustained by a reading
of Mr. Kristols reflections, for at no place in them is there a clear
break with liberalism and its works. Indeed, Norman Podhoretz,
who with Mr. Kristol himself is probably the leading exponent of
the movement, has suggested that a more appropriate name for the
neoconservatives would be “neo-liberals.” According to Mr. Kristol,
“A conservative welfare state — what once was called a ‘social insur¬
ance’ state — is perfectly consistent with the neoconservative per¬
spective,” and he describes the Soviet Union not as a malevolent
force for global expansion but merely as an unpleasant “great power
whose interests often conflict with those of the United States.” If
Old Right conservatism was, in Clinton Rossiter’s phrase, a “thank¬
less persuasion,” neoconservatism is simply a harmless one, and
there is no reason for the Establishment Left to drive the neoconser¬
vatives into academic and journalistic exile as it succeeded in doing
to the Old Right. The neoconservatives may, in fact, be seen as the
right wing of the New Class that they criticize so much, engaged in
an effort to moderate its collectivist and utopian dynamic with a
strong dose of bourgeois liberalism.

Some years ago, in an exchange with the neoconservative sociol-

94

Beautiful Losers

ogist Peter Berger, James Burnham remarked that although the neo-
conservatives had formally broken with liberal ideology, they re¬
tained the “gestalt of liberalism.” its emotional, psychic, and moral
reflexes. The reason they retain these reflexes is that the neoconser¬
vatives are the products, socially and intellectually, of the north¬
eastern urban academic establishment that is the natural habitat of
both the declining bourgeoisie and its pathologies and of the new
managerial-verbalist class that is succeeding the bourgeois order.
Irving Kristol’s most recent book shows that he, for one, still retains
these reflexes and many of the intellectual and political ambiguities
that attend them and that these ambiguities account for the tepid
and often shallow precepts that the neoconservatives offer. It is one
thing for the American Right to accept the neoconservatives as po¬
litical allies, but this acceptance must be balanced by recognition
that their ideas are not an adequate substitute for a more far-reach¬
ing critique of the bourgeois order and its legacies.

Neoconservatism and
the Managerial Revolution

The emergence in the 1970s of the political and intellectual move¬
ment known as “neoconservatism” is generally regarded as a re¬
sponse to the failures of conventional liberalism to deal effectively
with the challenges of that decade. Neoconservatives, in Irving Kris-
tol’s well-known definition, are “liberals who have been mugged by
reality” — persons whose lifelong commitment to liberalism was
unsettled by the patent contradictions that political and social real¬
ities began to present to the articles of liberal doctrine. College
students who burned libraries and attacked their professors and high
school graduates who were illiterate violated the liberal faith in edu¬
cation as an instrument of human improvement. Communist regimes
that refused to converge with the West and consistently betrayed
their international commitments mocked the liberal preference for
negotiation over force as a means of settling global conflicts. Third
World states that did not develop economically or politically and
indulged in orgies of racism, genocide, and terrorism challenged
the liberal ideal of a Western democratic mixed economy as the goal
of human progress. Minorities that would not or could not be assim¬
ilated by liberal policies raised questions about the feasibility of
social engineering and the reliability of environmentalist explana¬
tions of inequality. An economy that exhibited hyperinflation, exor¬
bitant fiscal burdens, and declining standards of affluence contra¬
dicted the prescriptions of Keynesian orthodoxy. At the level of
national and international policy and in the most visible currents of
contemporary society, the poverty of conventional twentieth-cen¬
tury liberalism became manifest to an increasing number of Ameri¬
can intellectuals.

The failure of liberalism was thus the immediate historical occa¬
sion of the emergence of neoconservatism. Almost none of the ad¬
herents of this movement came from what is now generally called
the Old Right; almost all approached it from the Left, usually the
moderate Left, but sometimes from rather far on the Left. Vet when-

95

96

Beautiful Losers

ever a sizeable portion of a social formation such as an intellectual
class begins to change or modify its beliefs and ideology, there is
more involved than a purely cerebral process. Social and political
forces express ideas and values that reflect their interests and per¬
form functions for them in their efforts to keep or acquire power.
This is true for neoconservatism no less than for the Old and New
Right and the Old and New Left, and whatever the strength, attrac¬
tiveness, or truth of the ideas of these movements, no explanation of
them can be complete if it neglects their aspirations and interests
and their relationships to dominant and declining social and politi¬
cal forces.

The twentieth century, for the United States as well as for the rest
of the world, has been an age of revolution of far more profound
transformational effect than any the modern world has ever experi¬
enced. Perhaps not since neolithic times has mankind undergone
simultaneous changes in economic, social, political, and intellec¬
tual relationships of such far-reaching consequences. Some aspects
of this transformation are obvious and have been explored by count¬
less analysts — the rise of totalitarianism, the intellectual revolution
precipitated by Einstein and Freud, the decline of the Euro-American
civilization and the rise of non-white power centers, the evolution
of a “postindustrial” technology and economy in place of agricul¬
tural and manufacturing sectors. Yet for all the theories, explana¬
tions, and accounts of the twentieth-century revolution, there is no
better perspective from which to view this transformation than
James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution, formulated in
1941. Despite many flaws, inaccurate predictions, and overstate¬
ments, Burnham’s theory perceives the essential core of the twen¬
tieth-century revolution and contains the elements by which the
complex political and intellectual ramifications of our age can be
explained.

Although in a narrow sense Burnham’s theory sought to explain
the civilizational impact of the “separation of ownership and con¬
trol’ in the corporate economy and the rise of large corporations
directed by professional managers rather than by traditional indi¬
vidual owners and partnerships, in a broader sense his theory ap¬
plies to political and social, as well as to economic, organizations.

1 he characteristic feature of twentieth-century history has been the

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

97

vast expansion in the size, scale of transactions, and complexity and
technicality of functions that political, social, and economic orga¬
nizations exhibit. This expansion, which Pitrim Sorokin also noted
under the label “colossalism,” was itself made possible by the growth
of mass populations and by the development of technologies that
could sustain the colossal scale of organization. Just as business firms
expanded far beyond the point at which they could be operated,
directed, and controlled effectively by individual owners and their
families, who generally lacked the technical skills to manage them,
so the state also underwent a transformation in scale that removed it
from the control of traditional elites, citizens, and their legal repre¬
sentatives. Just as in the mass corporations a new elite of profes¬
sional managers emerged that replaced the traditional entrepre¬
neurial or bourgeois elite of businessmen, so in the state also a new
elite of professionally trained managers or bureaucrats developed
that challenged and generally became dominant over the older po¬
litical elites of aristocrats and amateur politicians who occupied the
formal offices of government. Both in the economy and the state,
organizations began to undertake functions for which a smaller
scale of organization was not prepared and which the traditional
elites of aristocratic and bourgeois society were unable to perform.
A similar process occurred in labor unions, professional associa¬
tions, churches, educational institutions, military organizations,
and the organs of mass communication and cultural expression. In
all sectors of twentieth-century industrial society, the growth of
mass organizations brought with it an expansion of functions and
power, a new elite wedded by its material interests and psychic and
intellectual preparation to continuing expansion, and a metamor¬
phosis of the organizations themselves as well as of the social and
political orders they dominated.

The rise of mass organizations and the new, managerial elites that
controlled them involved also the evolution of new social and politi¬
cal ideologies — indeed, a new world view — that rationalized the
functions and power of the new elite. Traditionalist and bourgeois
ideologies, centering on the individual as moral agent, citizen, and
economic actor, could not provide justifications for the managerial
economy and the managerial state. Managerial society involves the
collective organization and disciplining of huge masses of workers.

98

Beautiful Losers

citizens, soldiers, and consumers, and the political and economic
individualism of the bourgeois era offered little predicate for such
collectivist coordination. Traditional social relationships, especially
the inheritance of leadership and property through family and com¬
munity bonds, became irrelevant in the large corporation, controlled
by managerial “meritocracies” and not by the owners of property.
The units of the economy — corporations and mass unions — them¬
selves became closely integrated with the mass state and dependent
on the state for legal privileges, subsidization, and the regulation of
aggregate demand through fiscal and monetary policy. Bourgeois
economic theory, enshrined in the laissez faire thought of the classi¬
cal economists, offered no conceptual framework for the new inter¬
dependence of state and economy that characterized managerial
society and the managerial system. In the state itself, the bourgeois
ideal of a neutralist, minimal government by law was replaced by a
managerial political ideal that involved a bureaucratic, social engi¬
neering state actively intervening in and altering by design the eco¬
nomic, social, and even intellectual and moral relationships of its
subjects. Outside economic and political relations, the social fabric
of traditional and bourgeois society — localized, private, centered
on self-contained communities and kinship networks — acted as a
constraint on the development of the colossal scale of managerial
organizations. Hence, it was in the interest of the new elites to dis¬
solve the old social fabric, to break up local community and family
bonds, and to reorganize the members of such institutions into the
massive political and economic structures under their own control.
The new ideology of the managerial regime thus involved a cosmo¬
politan, universalist, and egalitarian myth that challenged the local¬
ized and traditionalist loyalties and moral values of bourgeois soci¬
ety and offered a rationalization for the dominance of managerial
organizations and their elites.

The ideology of the emerging managerial regime in the United
States came to be known as “progressivism” and later as “liberalism,”
though a more appropriate label might be “managerial humanism.”
The ideology articulated a view of man as the product of social and
economic environment and thus susceptible to amelioration or per¬
fection by a scientifically trained elite with power to redesign the
environment. It involved a collectivist view of the state and econ-

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

99

omy and advocated a highly centralized regime largely unrestrained
by traditional legal, constitutional, and political barriers. It rejected
or regarded as backward, repressive, or obsolete the institutions
and values of traditional and bourgeois society — its loyalties to the
local community, traditional religion, and moral beliefs, the family,
and social and political differentiations based on class, status, and
property — and it expressed an ideal of man “liberated” from such
constraints and re-educated or redesigned into a cosmopolitan par¬
ticipant in the mass state-economy of the managerial system.

The evolution of the new order and its ideology was not, of course,
the result of a conspiracy or a conscious design on the part of its
founders, but rather the product of an almost irresistible process by
which new technologies, new forms of organization, and new ideas
joined together to challenge and replace old forms that were unable
to sustain or accommodate the immense scale of human numbers
and their interactions. Those who gained from this process — the
new managerial elites — encouraged it instinctively from a combined
sense of their personal and group interests and their unquestioned
faith in their self-serving ideology.

Yet the managerial regime did not evolve nor its elites become
dominant in the economy, government, and mass society without a
struggle. From the early twentieth century to the present, the social
and political forces that resisted the formation of the managerial
regime and the implementation of its agenda constituted a conser¬
vative, at times reactionary, influence. Small businessmen and entre¬
preneurs, the more parochial sectors of American society, lower
middle-class elements, and groups that found the fiscal burden and
social effects of the new regime a threat to their economic status and
cultural identity provided the political base of the conservative re¬
sistance to managerial forces and ideas. The members of this base
saw in the fusion of state and economy a threat to their own inde¬
pendent standing, endangered by the labor unions, regulations, and
intervention imposed by the new managerial state in partnership
with mass corporations. They saw their own values and institutions
denigrated and undermined by the cosmopolitan ethic and egalitar¬
ian policies of the new elite. They suffered from the inflation and
exorbitant taxation that financed the managerial state and from the
crime and social dislocation that resulted from its social policies, by

100

Beautiful Losers

which the managerial regime subsidized an urban proletariat as its
own political base. They were offended and often frightened by the
globalist and, in their view un-American, international policies of
the elite, which involved permanent intervention in world affairs,
expensive foreign aid programs, the prospect of global war, and the
renunciation of national interests in return for a cosmopolitan “one-
world" that they regarded as both illusory and dangerous.

The conservative and essentially bourgeois resistance to the man¬
agerial regime was uncoordinated and largely ineffective until the
death of Franklin Roosevelt (under whom the managerial revolution
achieved its most dramatic and far-reaching victories) and the end
of the depression and World War II. In the years following 1945,
however, the resistance began to revive with a new political and
intellectual movement that actively challenged the managerial agenda
in Congress, in presidential elections, and in verbal and intellectual
conflicts. The intellectual movement that for the most part provided
the ideological underpinnings of American conservatism has been
chronicled by George H. Nash,1 and though its more sophisticated
exponents were not usually directly involved in practical politics,
the movement as a whole was antimanagerial and probourgeois in
its thrust and was aware, to one degree or another, that it repre¬
sented a force that was in the process of being dispossessed by a
revolution.

The perception of the revolutionary impact of managerial liber¬
alism was implicit in Whittaker Chambers’s explanation of contem¬
porary history.

I saw that the New Deal was only superficially a reform movement. I had to
acknowledge the truth of what its more forthright protagonists, sometimes
defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest
purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change
in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was
not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and law¬
making. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the
power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our
time. This shift was the revolution.2

1. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement since 1945 (New
York. Basic Books. 19^6).

2. \\ hittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), 4^2.

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

101

Frank S. Meyer, one of the most influential and representative voices
of postwar American conservatism, in 1958 also pointed to the rev¬
olutionary implications of managerial liberalism:

In a fundamental sense the dominant forces in American life today are revo¬
lutionary, that is, they are directed towards the destruction of the principles
of Western civilization and the American tradition. The politics of New Deal-
ism, Fair Dealism, and New Republicanism are directed towards the strength¬
ening of the State and the diminution of the person. The prevalent quasi-
Marxist and Keynesian economics are directed towards the substitution of a
state-controlled, ever less “mixed,” economy for the free economy of cap¬
italism. The positivist and materialist philosophy of our educational theory
and practice, of our radio and television and press, of our academic and
intellectual circles, eats away at the fabric of principle and belief which is
Western civilization. Everywhere the same revolutionary spirit expresses
itself. For the conservative to compromise with it is to give up his reason for
being. ... Its contemporary political forms were described . . . sixteen
years ago by James Burnham, who called it “the managerial revolution.” Its
historical and philosophical meaning has been drawn forth and powerfully
presented by Eric Voegelin, who calls it “gnosticism.”3

Willmoore Kendall also spoke of the “Liberal Revolution,” though
he did not link its political ideology with any particular social force
and appears during most of his life to have believed that it had made
limited progress in practical political achievements. James Burnham,
in a series of books, explored the political and intellectual conse¬
quences of the emergence of the managerial elite and its ideology.4

On a practical level, conservative resistance to and hostility toward
the new managerial regime was expressed in the political move¬
ments led in the 1950s by Robert A. Taft, Joseph R. McCarthy, and
later by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and, to some extent, George
Wallace. While the right wing of the Republican party expressed the
traditional entrepreneurial ideology and values of the old bourgeois
elite, the left wing of the Republicans and the mainstream of the
Democratic party became the political vehicles of the managerial
class. Any examination of the advertisements carried by conserva-

3. Frank S. Meyer, The Conservative Mainstream (New Rochelle, N. 5 Arlington
House, 1969), 85-86.

4. For an account of Burnham s political thought in terms of his theory of the
managerial revolution, see Samuel T. Francis, Power and History : The Political
Thought of James Burnham (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 198 t ).

102

Beautiful Losers

tive periodicals of the 1950s and 1960s shows that the economic
base of the conservative movement lay largely in smaller-scale, pri¬
vately owned and operated, and locally oriented firms, and not in
the multinational, managerially controlled corporations. One of the
principal sources of weakness of the conservative movement in this
period lay precisely in the limited financial resources, small num¬
bers, and lack of cultural sophistication that typified the elements of
its political and economic base and derived from the declining for¬
tunes of the bourgeois elite in an age of managerial ascendancy.

Yet the revitalization of conservatism in the postwar period was
paralleled by an equally significant change in the ideology of liber¬
alism. In the early part of the century, managerial ideology had
been radical in its thrust. It challenged the legitimacy of traditional
values and institutions, advocated far-reaching reforms in political
and economic arrangements, and aggressively used the executive
branch of the state, allied with the lower- and working-class masses,
to impose its ideological demands for more federal regulation, more
equality, and more mass democracy. With the consolidation of its
political, economic, and cultural power in the course of the New
Deal and World War II era, however, the new elite began to mute or
retreat from the radical and progressivist content of its ideology.
The challenging of established authority was no longer useful to the
managerial elite in the bureaucracy of the central government, the
management of large corporations, and the intelligentsia of mass
universities, foundations, and organs of mass communication and
cultural and intellectual expression, as it had been to the same forces
when their goal was to acquire power. Once the managerial elite
had itself occupied the positions of established authority, its inter¬
ests lay in defending and conserving these positions and the legit¬
imacy of the processes by which they gained power. Certainly it was
not the first time in history that a new elite had compromised the
radicalism of its ideology and transformed itself into a conservative
force. The bourgeoisie in Western Europe and America in the eigh¬
teenth century had originally articulated a radical critique of the
ancien regime in the ideology of classical liberalism, but in the
course of bourgeois dominance in the nineteenth century, the ide-
ology was transmuted into an essentially conservative framework.

American liberalism in the late 1940s and 1950s began to exhibit

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

103

a similar tendency. “Liberalism,” wrote Eric F. Goldman of the late
1940s, “turned into a form of conservatism,”5 and during the 1952
presidential campaign, Adlai Stevenson actually called himself a con¬
servative. Liberal intellectuals — Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Reinhold
Niebuhr, most prominently — began to reformulate liberalism in a
way that muted the radical, progressivist, egalitarian, and utopian
premises of the Progressive Era and to talk about “original sin,” the
inherent irrationality of human nature, and the limitations of politi¬
cal solutions to intractable problems of the human condition. The
themes of “pluralism,” “consensus,” and “the end of ideology” char¬
acterized the mainstream of American liberalism from the 1940s to
the end of the 1960s.

“Consensus liberalism” — what the New Left later called “corpo¬
rate liberalism” because of its positive and uncritical concept of
corporate capitalism — in fact reflected the new position and power
of the managerial elite and the mass organizations it controlled.
Each of the three principal sectors of the managerial regime — the
bureaucratized apparatus of the federal government, the large cor¬
porations, and the media of mass communication and education —
played a special role in the “consensus” or “pluralistic” order that
postwar liberalism advocated and defended. Liberalism endorsed
and rationalized the evolution of the “Imperial Presidency” that pre¬
sided over the regulatory and interventionist bureaucracy, the glob¬
alist diplomacy, and the military managers of the mass state. Its
most articulate representatives made their living and acquired an
unprecedented degree of political and cultural influence in the aca¬
demic and mass communications establishments that increasingly
resembled and were intertwined with the bureaucratized structures
of the state and corporations. The corporations themselves were
defended by consensus liberalism, which regarded them as an es¬
sential part of the “pluralist” managerial system.

After the war the crisis of capitalism had failed to make its expected reap¬
pearance, and unprecedented prosperity began eroding the old antagonism
toward big business. Here the representative figure was the Harvard econo-

5. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American
Reform, rev. cd,, abrdg. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 334.

104

Beautiful Losers

mist John Kenneth Galbraith. . . . Large corporations were not the enemies
of economic efficiency but the promoters of technological progress.6

and

Intellectual liberals unashamedly asserted the benevolence of large corpora¬
tions and defended the existing distribution of wealth and power in Amer¬
ica. Political liberals assumed corporate hegemony and pursued policies to
strengthen it. The quintessential corporate liberal was John F. Kennedy, who
never pretended to be otherwise and for whom the good opinion of big
business was the highest political priority."

Despite the conservative, stabilizing, and establishmentarian ap¬
pearance of consensus liberalism, however, the managerial system
is incapable of stabilization. The dynamic of managerial capitalism
involves a continuing erosion of the social and cultural fabric through
the mass consumption and hedonism, social mobility, and disloca¬
tion that it promotes and through the obsolescence of hard private
property, under the control of individual and family ownership,
that corporate and collective property and governmental regulation
encourage. The managerial state obtains its raison d'etre from con¬
tinuing intervention, activism, and social engineering, as became
clear in the War on Poverty, the civil rights revolution, and the Great
Society programs. The intellectuals, technocrats, and professional
verbalists of the managerial intelligentsia and communications elite —
what Kevin Phillips has called the “mediacracy” — are committed by
their material interests and their ideological predispositions to the
design and implementation of continuing social change, the rejec¬
tion and destruction of the bourgeois constraints on their functions
and power, and the defense and extension of the apparatus of the
managerial system. The rhetoric of conservatism did not alter the
basic reality of the managerial regime and its continuing revolution,
and the reality came to the surface again in the utopian imagery of
the New Frontier,” “Camelot,” and “Great Society” of the 1960s
and even in the planning of the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson and
his advisers projected a “TVA on the Mekong” that would “solve”

6. Allen J Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the
HjbOs (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). 6-T

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

105

the environmental problems that, in their view, lay at the root of
communism, and the “McNamara Revolution” in the Defense Depart¬
ment carried through the managerialization of war and the techno¬
cratic transformation of the military services. Few large corpora¬
tions supported Senator Barry Goldwater s rather quaint evocation
of bourgeois beliefs in the 1964 presidential campaign, and most
corporate donations accrued to the Johnson-Humphrey ticket.8 The
“conservatization” of managerial liberalism in the postwar era was
intended to legitimize the managerial regime by lending it the ap¬
pearance of continuity and respectability and to check the tenden¬
cies of the ideological Left to push the regime beyond what the elite
wanted and required, but it did not significantly slow or reverse the
radicalizing and antibourgeois mechanisms of the regime and its
system of social dominance by the managerial elite.

The conservatism of managerial liberalism was thus entirely dis¬
tinct from the bourgeois conservatism of the Old Right. The former
sought merely to conserve, rationalize, and legitimize the new man¬
agerial establishment in state, corporations, and mass media and
cultural institutions. The Old Right conservatives sought to con¬
serve and restore at least the principles and values if not the actual
institutions of the premanagerial bourgeois order and the social,
moral, and religious traditions that formed the substratum of bour¬
geois society. The two “conservatisms” were, in fact, incompatible,
and much of the literature of 1950s liberalism concerned itself with
proving that it, not bourgeois conservatism, was the true represen¬
tative of the American tradition.

The claim of consensus liberalism to be the true conservatism was
buttressed by an impressive and elaborate interpretation of Ameri¬
can history and society articulated by such historians as Daniel Boor-
stin, Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and David Potter and by soci¬
ologists such as Daniel Bell, Arnold Rose, Talcott Parsons, David
Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Seymour Lipset. The aggressiveness of
the McCarthy movement and the efflorescence of serious anti-lib¬
eral thought in National Review and among the writers associated
with it in the 1950s required a response from consensus liberalism.
The very existence and popularity of such movements suggested

8. Ibid., 151.

106

Beautiful Losers

that there was something else in the American tradition besides a
“liberal consensus” and a teleological movement toward the New
Deal and its legacy.

The response that consensus liberals gave to the rise of the politi¬
cal and intellectual Right of the 1950s was the theory of “status
anxiety,” most notably formulated in an anthology of essays, The
Radical Right , edited by Daniel Bell with contributions from Glazer,
Hofstadter, Parsons, Lipset, and other representatives of 1950s lib¬
eralism.9 The gist of the theory of the anthology was that McCarthy-
ism represented the frustrations of the mass man and the resent¬
ments of socially dislocated strata of American society against
traditional upper-class leadership of the northeastern “establish¬
ment” as symbolized by banking and manufacturing elites, pres¬
tigious universities, and the foreign service and its ideology of “one-
worldism,” or globalism. The political meaning of the collection,
stripped of its verbal and social science camouflage, was that the
American Right of the 1950s was, in Hofstadter s term, “pseudo¬
conservative” and that it had no legitimate or important place in the
liberal “consensus” or indeed in the American political mainstream.
This interpretation of the political Right also involved the ascription
of economic motivations to the financial supporters of the move¬
ment and the use of the “authoritarian personality” model devel¬
oped by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School; and the social
and political base of the American Right was perceived as essen¬
tially identical to that of European totalitarian movements.

Subsequent empirical research seriously challenged this interpre¬
tation of “McCarthyism” and the right-wing movements of the 1950s.
There was, to be sure, at least in the grassroots components of the
Right, a hostility toward newly established elites, their upper-class
collaborators (Franklin Roosevelt had been a “traitor to his class”)
and their ideology and institutions, as well as a visible sense of
frustration. It is likely that traditional and bourgeois elements in the
movements of the Right accurately perceived the revolutionary im¬
plications of the managerial elite and its quite narrow “consensus”
ideology and that their frustrations and resentments were the prod-

9. Daniel Bell, ed.. The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and
Updated (Garden City, N Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1964).

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

107

uct of thwarted economic interests, threatened social and cultural
values, and political weakness.

What was missing from the psychological explanation of the
American Right was any effort to apply the same methodologies
and concepts to liberalism and its social and political context. This
one-sided use of social science was characteristic of the environ¬
mentalist and relativist sociology that the reformers and intellec¬
tuals of the Progressive movement had developed. As Eric Goldman
has written,

W hen they [the reformers] said that all ideas must be related to economic
interest, they did not really mean all ideas; they meant only their opponents’
ideas. So conservatism became a rationalization of greed, while the tenets of
progressivism were “scientific,” “objective,” and “moral,” the same kind of
absolute Truth and Good that has immemorially given men enthusiasm for a
cause. 10

Historian Allen Matusow has also suggested the political motiva¬
tions involved in the transformation of American liberalism from a
faith in mass democracy to an elitist pluralism:

The groups accused of status anxiety and of practicing McCarthy ism (e.g.,
urban Catholics and midwestern farmers) belonged to the same “masses”
whom the intellectuals had romanticized in the 1930s. Traumatized by Mc-
Carthyism, many intellectuals began to reassess the assumptions that had
once supported their faith in these masses and in popular democracy. The
result of their reflections was the so-called New Conservatism, or as political
theorists called it, pluralism. 1 1

The one-sidedness and political convenience of the consensus lib¬
eral interpretation of the American Right reveals the ideological func¬
tions that the social sciences performed for its exponents. In their
hands, sociology, economics, psychology, political science, and
history operated not as disciplines to explain reality but as political
weapons.

The consolidation of managerial control of the mass organiza¬
tions of the central state, corporations and unions, and the larger

10. Goldman. Rendezvous with Destiny, 155.

11. Allen J. Matusow, ed., Joseph R. McCarthy (Englewood Cliffs, \ J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1970), 131-32.

108

Beautiful Losers

organs of mass communications, education, and culture established
the framework for the “consensus” to which managerial liberalism
appealed. Despite its claim to “pluralism,” however, the consensus
effectively excluded and denied intellectual and political legitimacy
to all nonliberal ideas and movements — to the American Right as
well as to the Left. The consensus nevertheless served an important
function for the managerial intelligentsia, for it legitimized intellec¬
tuals and verbalists as the mind as well as the conscience of the new
elite, and the managerial system offered considerable material and
psychic rewards to the intellectuals who designed its public policy
agenda, explained and justified the agenda to the mass population,
instructed new generations of managers in the skills and techniques
as well as in the articles of faith of managerial rule, and debated and
interpreted the specific policies and activities of the system. As
Richard Hofstadter acknowledged,

Social scientists . . . had special reason for a positive interest in the reform
movements. The development of regulative and humane legislation required
the skills of lawyers and economists, sociologists and political scientists, in
the writing of laws and in the staffing of administrative and regulative bodies.
Controversy over such issues created a new market for the books and maga¬
zine articles of the experts and engendered a new respect for their spe¬
cialized knowledge. Reform brought with it the brain trust. 12

Nevertheless, the era of liberal-managerial “consensus” of the
1950s and early 1960s did not last. The political and cultural schisms
of the late 1960s, from both the Left and the Right, and the evident
failures and crises of the colossal managerial apparatus, disrupted
the functioning of the system and discredited its formula of consen¬
sus liberalism. On the one hand, the New Left and the counter¬
culture rejected and ridiculed the complacency of consensus liber¬
alism and demanded an acceleration of the managerial agenda far
beyond what the elite in government, corporations and unions, and
the educational and communications establishment was willing to
grant. The New Left demands for social and economic equality and
its hatred for traditional and bourgeois values and institutions were

12. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York:
Random House, 1955), 155.

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

109

all consistent with the earlier progressivism of managerial liber¬
alism but were incompatible with the interests of the managerial
elite and with the mass organizations they directed. There was no
way for the managerial intelligentsia to express its antipathy for
New Left ideology and aims without betraying its own professed
beliefs and revealing the self-serving nature of its ideology, and the
New Left and its countercultural allies insistently hammered away
at the vulnerabilities of consensus liberalism and the managerial
system it served.

On the other hand, the Wallace movement and the embryonic
New Right of the 1970s also rejected the liberal consensus and much
of the managerial system. In fact the New Right was far more radical
and threatening to the system than the New Left. When Wallace
railed against “bureaucrats,” “intellectuals,” and the “media,” he did
not, like the New Left, limit his passion to the military arm of the
managerial state (in which he had little interest) but meant its whole
social engineering apparatus, its allies in the intelligentsia, and even
its corporate sector. His following cared little for the bourgeois slo¬
gans of the “free market” and constitutionalist integrity but was
concerned mainly with the “social issues,” the protection of their
own social, cultural, and economic standing, and the rejection of
managerial cosmopolitanism and social engineering. Moreover,
Wallace and the New Right drew their votes and much of their finan¬
cial support from the core of the political base of the managerial
system in the white, urban, working and lower middle class. While
the political challenge from the New Left dwindled after the McGovern
campaign of 1972, the militancy and success of the New Right in
the following years continued the challenge to the managerial sys¬
tem and successfully questioned the social, economic, and foreign
policies of the system in a series of highly visible and salient issue
campaigns — the opposition to busing, the Equal Rights Amendment,
the Panama Canal treaties, the extended regulation and interven¬
tionism represented by such agencies as the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protec¬
tion Agency (EPA), and in the tax revolt of the late 1970s.

By the mid 1970s it was evident to a sizeable portion of the intel¬
lectual and verbalist class that consensus liberalism in its pristine
form was no longer functional, that intellectuals and verbalists were

110

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being drawn into an “adversary eulture” of the Left, that large seg¬
ments of American society were attracted to New Right movements,
and that a new or rev ised formula had to be developed if the mana¬
gerial system was to retain legitimacy. The result of that realization
was neoconservatism, which rejected both the explicit collectivism,
utopianism, and anti-Americanism of the New Left that frightened
and offended most Americans as well as the more radical implica¬
tions of the New Right.

Neoconservatism rejected all forms of extremism and all suggestions
of a need for far-reaching change. “The basic credo of us Neo-con¬
servatives, or whatever you want to call us,” stated Ben Wattenberg
in 1980, “is that society moderately and gradually self-corrects.” 13
Moderation, gradualism, empiricism, pragmatism, centrism became
the watchwords of neoconservatism, whereby confrontation with
the fundamental mechanisms and tendencies of the managerial sys¬
tem and fundamental changes suggested by either the Right or the
Left w ere avoided. In the neoconservative view of America, there
w as nothing seriously wrong with the society and government that
had developed between the New Deal and the Great Society, and it
was the goal of neoconservatives to communicate the soundness of
the managerial system to the adversary intellectuals of the Left and
to co-opt the militant activists of the New7 Right.

Neoconservatism w7as thus the heir of the consensus liberalism of
the 1950s and 1960s and served the same stabilizing and legitimiz¬
ing functions for the managerial regime. Norman Podhoretz ac¬
knowledged as much in the late 1970s:

These intellectual adversaries of the adversary culture were often called
“neo-conservatives,” a designation happily accepted hv some (like Irving
Kristol) but rejected by most others, who continued to think of themselves as
liberals. “Neo-liberal” would perhaps have been a more accurate label for the
entire group than neo-conservative, except for the fact that its liberalism was
old and not new — that is, it derived from the New Deal and not from the New
Politics. 1 *

13. Objections to Conservatism (Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1980), 59.

14. Norman Podhoretz, 'The Adversary Culture and the New Class,” in B. Bruce-
Briggs, ed„ The New Class? (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1979), 30-31.

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

111

Indeed, a number of neoeonservatives — Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer,
Seymour Lipset — had themselves been architects of consensus liber¬
alism and had been associated with or had strongly influenced oth¬
ers such as Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. Some, like Jeane Kirk¬
patrick, Ben Wattenberg, Elliott Abrams, and Carl Gershman, had
been close associates of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Henry
Jackson, and other political leaders of the managerial state.

To be sure, neoconservatism retreated from or modified the con¬
ventional liberal emphasis on the state as the proper instrumentality
of progressive social change, but it is difficult to find in the body of
neoconservative thought any principled rejection of this role of gov¬
ernment.15 Thus Irving Kristol, one of the most conservative of the
neoconservatives, has written equivocally of the “nostalgia” of the
free market ideas of F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman and has en¬
dorsed the essential structure of the managerial state:

In economic and social policy, it [neoconservatism] feels no lingering hostil¬
ity to the welfare state, nor does it accept it resignedly, as a necessary evil.
Instead it seeks not to dismantle the welfare state in the name of free-market
economics but rather to reshape it so as to attach to it the conservative
predispositions of the people. This reshaping will presumably take the form
of trying to rid the welfare state of its paternalistic orientation, imposed on it
by Left-liberalism, and making it over into the kind of “social insurance
state” that provides the social and economic security a modern citizenry
demands while minimizing governmental intrusion into individual liberties. 16

It is difficult to tell what this passage means, except that neoconser¬
vatism has little interest in dismantling or radically restructuring
the welfare state, and it does not explain how, in a mass democracy,
the demands of a “modern citizenry” can be restricted to basic “so¬
cial and economic security” or indeed in what such security con¬
sists. In short, the neoconservative idea of the welfare state leaves
open the possibility of the continuing expansion of central govern¬
ment and its resumption of its social engineering functions, and it
thus supports a principal pillar of the managerial regime and agenda.

15. Neoconservatives were at first more critical of large and active government
than they later became in the course of the Reagan administration and afterwards

16. Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking
Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), xii.

112

Beautiful Losers

The preferred instrument of progress for neoconservatives is the
managerial corporation and “democratic capitalism,” which, in
neoconservative Michael Novak’s view, engenders a “continuous
revolution” resulting in increasing levels of material affluence and
cultural “openness” in place of the confining institutions and values
of traditional and bourgeois society. 1-7 While neoconservatism for¬
mally recognizes the importance of religion, family, morality, com¬
munity, and patriotism in creating and preserving a free society, it
has generally emphasized social conservatism less than foreign pol¬
icy, defense, and economic issues. Thus, Ben Wattenberg has indi¬
cated the priorities of neoconservative policy, as well as its basic
shallowness:

The central notion that Senator [Daniel Patrick] Movnihan has been pursuing
these many years might be characterized as “the Russians are coming and
they are threatening human liberty”; and the central notion that Phyllis Schlafly
has been pursuing in recent years is: “unless vve stop ERA there will be men
in women’s rest rooms.” Then I would ask you to consider the following
statement by Mr. Gilder: “Phyllis Schlafly is better at defining national pri¬
orities than is Daniel Patrick Movnihan.” If you think ERA is a greater threat
to our civilization than the Soviet buildup, then you have your candidate. 18

Aside from Mr. Wattenberg ’s trivialization of the content and goals
of the anti-ERA movement, the non sequitur of his conclusion, and
the probability that Mrs. Schlafly s voting record, were she a mem¬
ber of the Senate, would compare favorably with that of Senator
Movnihan on conservative defense and foreign policy issues, what
Mr. Wattenberg apparently does not perceive is the strong connec¬
tion between the integrity and health of social institutions, such as
the family, which Mrs. Schlafly sees threatened by the ERA and ideo¬
logical feminism, and the will of a nation to meet foreign threats and
preserve its security. Mr. Wattenberg s apparent obliviousness to the
values of social conservatism is entirely consistent with the con¬
centration of managerial ideologies on purely material and “prag¬
matic” issues and their neglect of moral, social, and spiritual concerns.

17. Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982), 171-72.

18. Objections to Conservatism , 59; Mr. Wattenberg s remark was made in the
context of a debate with George Gilder.

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

113

In foreign policy itself, there appears to be a strong overlap be¬
tween neoconservatism and consensus liberalism. Both are anti¬
communist, but both also serve the managerial system and its glob¬
alist and cosmopolitan tendencies and interests by emphasizing a
Wilsonian global democratism as the proper response to the Soviet
Union and the appeal of communism (and indeed as the central
purpose of U.S. foreign policy). Under the Reagan Administration,
neoconservative Wilsonianism was manifested in the National En¬
dowment for Democracy and in increasing neoconservative sympa¬
thy for sanctions against South Africa, the ratification of the Geno¬
cide Convention, measures against the Pinochet government in Chile,
the ousting of Philippine President Marcos, the promotion of Jose
Napoleon Duarte over Roberto D'Aubuisson in El Salvador, the in¬
vocation of human rights against anticommunist allies of the United
States, and a general preference for an untested and impractical
social democracy over the pro-Western and anticommunist authori¬
tarian regimes of the Third World. Despite formal acceptance of the
“national interest” as the proper measuring rod of American foreign
policy (including a neoconserv ative journal of that name), in prac¬
tice the neoconservative interpretation of national interest reduces
to the integration of the United States into a global and cosmopoli¬
tan world order. The most insulting epithet in the neoconservative
lexicon of foreign affairs is not “anti-American,” “one-worlder,” o**
“pro-communist,” but “isolationist.” Democratic capitalism, com¬
bined with political and social democracy, is intended by neocon¬
servatives to solve the political and economic problems of Third
World states in the same way that consensus liberalism intended
foreign aid and managerial reconstruction to develop the political
and social democratic institutions of such countries.

The principal “enemy” for neoconservatism is what it calls the
“New Class,” which consists, in Irving Kristois description, of “sci¬
entists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminol¬
ogists, sociologists, public health doctors, and so forth — a substan¬
tial number of whom find their careers in the expanding public
sector rather than the private.”19 The New Class, in Mr. Kristois
v iew, is “far less interested in individual financial rewards than in

19. Kristol, Reflections, 211.

114

Beautiful Losers

the corporate power of their class” and sees in ideological themes
drawn from the New Left a means of rationalizing and extending its
class power. The neoconservative idea of the New Class, as Mr. Kristol
once acknowledged, was influenced by James Burnham’s theory of
the managerial elite, though for Mr. Kristol the New Class does not
include corporate managers and the technically skilled groups that
John Kenneth Galbraith terms the “technostructure,” the concept
of which was also influenced by Burnham’s theory.20 The exclusion
of the corporate managerial elite from the neoconservative idea of
the New Class is all the more striking in view of Mr. Kristol’s ac¬
knowledgment of what he calls the “corporate revolution” and his
understanding that “the large corporation has gone quasi-public,
that is, it now straddles, uncomfortably and uncertainly, both the
private and public sectors of our ‘mixed economy.’ ”21

The distinction and even the antagonism that Mr. Kristol draws
between the New Class, adversarial in its ideology and located in
the public sector, and the corporate managers is, in fact, necessary
to neoconservative theory and its ideological functions. To include
the corporate branch of the managerial elite within the New Class
would contradict the neoconservative view of the corporation as an
alternative instrument to the state. If the same social force were seen
as being in control of the state as well as the corporation, there
could be little differentiation in the elites that direct each sector and
hence little difference between their goals and activities. Manage¬
rial capitalism could not then be presented in neoconservative ide¬
ology as the benevolent agent of progress through “voluntary” action.
Moreover, to acknowledge that corporate managers are part of the
New Class and that both are derived from Burnham’s managerial
elite would jeopardize the distinctions neoconservatives draw be¬
tween the “good” liberalism of the New Deal era and the “bad”
liberalism of the late 1960s. Neoconservatism, if it is to function as
an effective legitimizing ideology for the managerial regime and to
preserve the regime from radical alterations by the Left, cannot ac¬
knowledge that the managerial elite in the corporation is essentially

20. Irving Kristol, “The ‘New Class’ Revisited,” Wall Street Journal, May 3L 1979,
24; John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 3d ed., rev. (New York: New
American Library, 1978), 107-9, 107, n. 6.

21. Kristol, Reflections, 204, 216.

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

115

the same as the New Class in the public sector, nor can it acknowl¬
edge that both groups share essentially the same interests, world
view, and agenda — the transcendence of bourgeois institutions and
values and the extension of the collectivist and cosmopolitan forms
of the managerial regime — or that the New Class and its agenda
were not the products of the 1960s but of the managerial revolution
of the early part of the century. To use the theory of the managerial
revolution to link the New Class enemy with a corporate elite that is
a neoconservative ally and to see both the New Class and the corpo¬
rate elite as products of New Deal-Great Society-era liberalism
would implicate the “bad” liberalism with the “good” liberalism of
the New Deal.

Neoconservatives are, in fact, involved in what their liberal critic
Peter Steinfels calls the “war for the New Class.”22 Nowhere in their
analysis and critique of the New Class do neoconservatives urge or
even insinuate its abolition or the radical restructuring of the mass
organizations that the New Class directs and on which its position
and interests depend, and the concept of the New Class is less a soci¬
ological than an ideological construct. In neoconservative discus¬
sions of the New Class, individuals appear to be included in this
category not on the basis of their social position but rather because
of what they believe. Neoconservatives object mainly to what the New
Class thinks, not to its existence, its position, its power, or the pro¬
cesses by which it holds power, and, as Steinfels points out, the neo¬
conservatives are themselves part of the New Class.23 In this sense,
the neoconservative sociology of the New Class is really a pseudo¬
sociology, reminiscent of the use of social science as a political and
ideological weapon by the reformers of the Progressive Era and the
consensus liberals of the 1950s.

Neoconservatives genuinely reject the New Left orientation of
some elements of the New Class because they understand that the
radical acceleration of social and political change that this orienta¬
tion advocates would destabilize and perhaps destroy the manage¬
rial system. New Left radicalism would thus be counterproductive,

22. Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing Amer¬
ica s Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), chap. 1 1
23- Ibid.. 285-86.

116

Beautiful Losers

or, as many neoconservatives think of it, reactionary, in jeopardizing
the gradual and more realistic means of implementing the manage¬
rial agenda that neoconservatism contemplates. What neoconser¬
vatives want, therefore, is not to disperse the New Class or to dis¬
mantle the mass structures of the managerial regime in which the
New Class occupies a position of power but rather to persuade the
radical elements of the New Class that their true ideological goals
and group interests are better served by neoconservative ideology
and methods than by New Leftism. Hence, neoconservatives habitu¬
ally address themselves not to grassroots audiences or to Old Right
constituencies but to the New Class itself. Virtually all of the jour¬
nals under neoconservative influence — Commentary , Public Inter¬
est \ National Interest, This World, New Criterion, the editorial
page of the Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, American Spec¬
tator — are intended for “elite” audiences; and “elite” in contempo¬
rary America means the New Class and the managerial establish¬
ment. The transformation of the American Spectator from the
right-wing, antiestablishment, irreverent, and occasionally radical
Alternative of the early 19“"0s into the solemn and pontifical neo¬
conservative journal for yuppies that it is today is of interest in this
regard. The advertisements once carried by the Alternative (aside
from those for local small businesses) generally quoted insulting
descriptions of the magazine from establishment journals and spokes¬
men. to communicate to potential readers the contempt in which
the editors of the magazine held the establishment. Today the Spec¬
tator sports ads listing the Important People who read it. In the
early 1980s, the magazine moved from its original base in Bloom¬
ington, Indiana, to Washington, D.C., a geographical transition that
conveniently symbolizes the magazine’s evolution from the anti-
managerial to the managerial Right.

If neoconservatives seek to provide a new managerial ideology
for the New Class or managerial elite in place of New Left ideas, they
also seek to co-opt and mute the radical antimanagerial impetus of
the Old and New Right. Efforts by the political Right to challenge
the managerial establishment — to nominate M. E. Bradford rather
than William Bennett for the chairmanship of the National Endow¬
ment for the Humanities in 1981 and to develop a serious conser¬
vative presence among university students through right-wing news-

Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution

117

papers and a conservative group called Accuracy in Academia — have
been vigorously opposed, resisted, and undermined by neoconser¬
vative leaders (even to the point, reportedly, that neoconservative
foundations threatened to terminate support for conservative groups
that did not toe the line). Unable to build a grassroots political con¬
stituency or electoral coalition themselves, neoconservatives wel¬
come New Right activism for providing a political base that can
elect a conservative or moderate President, but they seek to obstruct
the agenda of such constituencies if it threatens or interferes with
their own rather different agenda and interests.

While there is, to be sure, a certain overlap between the ideas and
agendas of neoconservatism and those of the Old and New Right,
and while each can be politically and intellectually helpful to the
other, ultimately the two movements seek incompatible goals. Neo¬
conservatives seek to rationalize, legitimize, defend, and conserve
the managerial regime — what conservatives have usually called the
“Liberal Establishment” — because the regime provides the social
force to which they belong with its social functions and power. The
Old and New Right have historically opposed the managerial regime
and have developed an ideology, an analysis of public policy, and an
electoral strategy by which the regime can be challenged and dis¬
mantled or radically reformed. The goals of the radicalism of the
Old Right are not the overthrow of the government and the destruc¬
tion of society in pursuit of an imaginary utopia, but the conserva¬
tion, in institutionalized forms, of the traditional beliefs that inform
Western and American civilizations in both their ancient and bour¬
geois manifestations. If neoconservative co-optation, and the dy¬
namics of the continuing managerial revolution, deflect the Ameri¬
can Right from this goal, the result will not be the renaissance of
America and the West but the continuation and eventual fulfillment
of the goals of their most committed enemies.

The Case of George Will

George F. Will,

Statecraft as Soulcraft:

What Government Does

Few writers who apply the label “conservative” to themselves
have acquired so prominent a position in establishment media as
George F. Will. A nationally syndicated columnist who regularly
appears in the Washington Post and Newsweek , a fixture on national
television discussion programs, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize,
Mr. Will has traveled a long way since he wrote articles for the Alter¬
native in the early 1970s. With the possible exceptions of Patrick J.
Buchanan, James K. Kilpatrick, and William F. Buckley, Jr., it is diffi¬
cult to think of any other self-described conservative publicist who
has so strikingly “made it.”

The secret of Mr. Will’s success is only in part attributable to his
many merits — his willingness to explore controversial areas of pub¬
lic life in a manner remarkably free of popular cliche and conven¬
tional wisdom, his learning in the literary and philosophical clas¬
sics, and his habitual articulateness. His success is due also to the
general thrust of his distinctive formulation of conservatism and the
way in which he applies his ideas to public matters, for it is evident
in much of his writing that Mr. Will is at considerable pains to sepa¬
rate himself from most Americans who today regard themselves as
conservatives and to assure his readers that there are important pub¬
lic institutions and policies, usually criticized by conservatives, with
which he has no quarrel.

Statecraft as Soulcraft is Mr. Will’s first real book, as opposed to
collections of his columns, and its purpose is to develop in a rather
systematic way his political beliefs and to explain how these beliefs —
“conservatism properly understood” — are different from and supe¬
rior to the ideas to which most American conservatives subscribe.
The most distinctive difference, he tells us in the preface, appears to
be his “belief in strong government.” “My aim,” he says, “is to recast

118

The Case of George Will

119

conservatism in a form compatible with the broad popular imper¬
atives of the day, but also to change somewhat the agenda and even
the vocabulary of contemporary politics. To those who are liberals
and to those who call themselves conservatives, I say: Politics is
more difficult than you think.”

Despite his assertion that today “there are almost no conservatives,
properly understood,” the principal line of argument of Statecraft
as Soulcraft will be familiar to most and largely congenial to many
American conservative intellectuals. It is Mr. Will’s argument that
modern political thought from the time of Machiavelli forward has
ignored or denied the ethical potentialities of human nature and has
concentrated on passion and self-interest as the constituent forces
of society and government. Modern politics therefore seeks to use
these forces, rather than to restrain or elevate them, in designing
social and political arrangements in such a way that passion and
self-interest will conduce to stability, prosperity, and liberty. “The
result,” he writes,

is a radical retrenchment, a lowering of expectations, a constriction of politi¬
cal horizons. By abandoning both divine and natural teleology, modernity
radically reoriented politics. The focus of politics shifted away from the
question of the most eligible ends of life, to the passional origins of actions.
The ancients were resigned to accommodating what the moderns are eager
to accommodate: human shortcomings. What once was considered a defect —
self-interestedness — became the base on which an edifice of rights was
erected.

The Founding Fathers also subscribed to the modernist school of
political thought, particularly James Madison, whose “attention is
exclusively on controlling passions with countervailing passions; he
is not concerned with the amelioration or reform of passions. The
political problem is seen entirely in terms of controlling the pas¬
sions that nature gives, not nurturing the kind of character that the
polity might need. He says, ‘We well know that neither moral nor
religious motives can be relied on.’ ”

The result of political modernism and its concentration on the
lower elements of human nature has been the loss of ideals of com¬
munity, citizenship, and the public moral order. With its emphasis
on “self-interest” and the proper arrangement or equilibrium of

120

Beautiful Losers

passions and appetites rather than their reform and improvement,
modernism has opened the door to the privatization of politics,
distrust of public authority, the pursuit of material and individual
self-interest, and the proliferation of individual rights in the form of
claims against government and society.

Once politics is defined negatively, as an enterprise for drawing a protective
circle around the individual’s sphere of self-interested action, then public
concerns are by definition distinct from, and secondary to, private con¬
cerns. Regardless of democratic forms, when people are taught by philoso¬
phy (and the social climate) that they need not govern their actions by cal¬
culations of public good, they will come to blame all social shortcomings on
the agency of collective considerations, the government, and will absolve
themselves.

Contemporary American conservatism, in Mr. Will’s view, as well as
contemporary liberalism, are both derived from political modernism.

They are versions of the basic program of the liberal-democratic political
impulse that was born with Machiavelli and Hobbes. Near the core of the
philosophy of modern liberalism, as it descends from those two men, is an
inadequacy that is becoming glaring. And what in America is called conser¬
vatism is only marginally disharmonious with liberalism. This kind of con¬
servatism is an impotent critic of liberalism because it too is a participant in
the modern political enterprise. . . . The enterprise is not wrong because it
revises, or even because it revises radically. Rather it is wrong because it
lowers, radically. It deflates politics, conforming politics to the strongest
and commonest impulses in the mass of men.

For Mr. Will, then, the proper corrective to the degeneration of
democracy and the substitution of private indulgence for the public
good is the restoration of ancient and medieval political and ethical
philosophy and its vindication of the role of government in con¬
straining private interests in deference to the public moral order
and in inculcating virtue — in other words, “legislating morality.”
“By the legislation of morality I mean the enactment of laws and
implementation of policies that proscribe, mandate, regulate, or
subsidize behavior that will, over time, have the predictable effect
of nurturing, bolstering or altering habits, dispositions and values
on a broad scale.” Such policies would clearly distinguish a “real
conservatism” from the fake American version:

The Case of George Will

121

The United States acutely needs a real conservatism, characterized by a con¬
cern to cultivate the best persons and the best in persons. It should express
renewed appreciation for the ennobling functions of government. It should
challenge the liberal doctrine that regarding one important dimension of
life — the “inner life” — there should be less government — less than there is
now, less than there recently was, less than most political philosophers have
thought prudent.

Despite Mr. Will s predilection for putting down contemporary
conservatives, the theoretical dimensions of his argument will come
as no great shock to many of them. It has been articulated in one
form or another by a number of American writers since the 1940s —
Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin, to name but a few Mr.
Will is quite correct that the libertarian and classical liberal faction
of American conservatism will dissent vigorously from his thought
and that they are not conservatives in the classical sense of the term.
Yet many prominent libertarians have resisted and rejected being
called conservatives, and it is hardly fair to criticize them for not
adhering to a body of ideas with which they have never claimed any
connection.

But it is hardly fair for Mr. Will to categorize all conservatives or
even the mainstream of American conservatism as libertarian. Al¬
though this mainstream has been oriented toward the defense of the
bourgeois order as expressed in classical liberal ideology, its prin¬
cipal exponents have generally been aware of the moral and social
foundations of classical liberal values and have accepted at least
some governmental role in the protection and encouragement of
these values. Conventional American conservatism is in effect a re¬
formulation of the Old Whiggery of the eighteenth century and has
sought to synthesize Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, order and
liberty, in what was ascribed to its most representative voice, Frank
S. Meyer, as “fusionism.”

There are of course serious philosophical problems in effecting
this synthesis, and the problems have never been satisfactorily re¬
solved; but the efflorescence of conservative thought around these
problems in recent decades shows that American conservatives are
neither as simple-minded nor as illiterate as Mr. Will wants us to
believe. In the last decade conservative political efforts have in¬
creasingly emphasized moral issues in campaigns against pornogra-

122

Beautiful Losers

phv, abortion, and the dissolution of the family and community,
and in favor of public support for religious faith. It is therefore
simply a gross error to claim that the American Right, old or new; is
oblivious to the role of government in sustaining morality.

Mr. Will, moreover, know s this, because he is himself a well-in¬
formed man and because he w as at one time an editor of National
Review and has had close intellectual and professional connections
with the conservative movement. Yet at no place in Statecraft as
Soulcraft is there any acknowledgment of the richness or variety of
contemporary conservative thought, any appreciation for the intel¬
lectual and political contributions of serious conservatives to sus¬
taining and reviving premodern political ideas, nor indeed any ref¬
erence at all to any contemporary conservative thinker. There is
only a constant barrage of patronizing and often contemptuous gen¬
eralization about “ soi-disant conservatives,” “something calling
itself conservatism,” and “ ‘conservatives.’ ”

Although the traditionalist and most antimodern orientation within
American conservatism w ill probably experience little discomfort
at Mr. W ill’s development of his ideas, it may have more problems
w ith some of his applications of his philosophy to contemporary
policy. Although Mr. Will is consistent in his strong support for the
illegalization of pornography and abortion, he also tries to use pre¬
modern or classical conservatism to endorse the welfare state and
to justify the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, both of which are
the principal creations of modern liberalism and constitute revolu¬
tionary engines by w hich the radicalizing dynamic of liberalism is
built into contemporary American government.

Although Mr. Will acknowledges that the “almost limitless ex¬
pansion of American government since the New7 Deal . . . was im¬
plicit in the commission given to government by modern political
philosophy : the commission to increase pleasure and decrease pain,”
he also believes that “the political system must also incorporate al¬
truistic motives. It does so in domestic policies associated with the
phrase ‘welfare state.’ These are policies that express the commu¬
nity's acceptance of an ethic of common provision." He cites Dis¬
raeli and Bismarck as conservative architects of the welfare state
and regards as the conservative principle underlying welfare the
idea “that private economic decisions often are permeated with a

The Case of George Will

123

public interest and hence are legitimate subjects of political debate
and intervention.”

Mr. Will is certainly correct in his assertion of this principle, but
the centralized, redistributive welfare apparatus created by liber¬
alism and resisted by conservatives is not legitimately derived from
the principle. The classical conservative vision of society as an or¬
ganic, hierarchical, and authoritative structure of reciprocal respon¬
sibilities implies a social duty to the poor, but it also implies a re¬
sponsibility on the part of the poor that the liberal “right to welfare”
denies. Moreover, the virtue of charity endorsed by classical conser¬
vatives presupposes an inequality of wealth and an ideal of noblesse
oblige that the architects of liberal welfare states abhor. Nor is the
classical conservative ideal of public welfare necessarily or primar¬
ily restricted to a centralized apparatus or even to government, but
rather allows for social provision of support through family, com¬
munity, church, and class obligations as well as at local levels of
government.

Finally, the classical conservative welfare state usually developed
in nondemocratic societies in which the lower orders who received
public largess did not also possess votes that gave them electoral
control of the public leaders who dispensed welfare. The mass dem¬
ocratic nature of the modern welfare state ensures the indefinite
expansion of necessary and desirable public provision into a social¬
ist redistribution of wealth that reduces the public order to a never-
ending feast for the private interests and appetites of those who
benefit from welfare. Yet even as they feast, the modern welfare
system also destroys lower-class families and communities. The sys¬
tem encourages the mass hedonism that characterizes bureaucratic
capitalism and enserfs the welfare class as the political base of the
bureaucratic-political elite in the state. The modern administrative
apparatus of the centralized welfare state thus supports a bureau¬
cratic and social engineering elite that devotes its energies to the
further destruction and reconstruction of the social order.

Mr. Will offers some suggestions “for a welfare system that sup¬
ports rather than disintegrates families” and which “will use gov¬
ernment to combat the tendency of the modern bureaucratic state
to standardize and suffocate diversity.” Frankly, it is not easy to see
how this can be accomplished, since governmental welfare repli-

24

Beautiful Losers

cates, usurps, and thus weakens the functions of the family and
community and must necessarily proceed along uniform legal and
administrative lines. Indeed, Mr. Will’s defense of the welfare state
suggests no awareness of the important differences between the
concept and actual functioning of the classical conservative welfare
state and those of modern liberalism. An important part of his case
is the pragmatic argument that conservatives must accept the wel¬
fare state or find themselves consigned to political oblivion. “A con¬
servative doctrine of the welfare state is required if conservatives
are even to be included in the contemporary political conversation”
and the idea of the welfare state “has now come and is not apt to
depart.”

“Conservatism properly understood,” then, accepts the premises
and institutions of contemporary liberalism and must not challenge
them if it is to enjoy success and participate in dialogue with a
dominant liberalism. Hence, any discussion of the very radical and
unsettling reforms that would be necessary to construct a welfare
state consistent with genuine classical conservatism, as opposed to
the abridged, expurgated, and pop version presented by Mr. Will,
would defeat his pragmatic purpose by alienating and frightening
the very liberal and establishment elites he is trying to impress.

Similarly. Mr. Will’s defense of the civil rights revolution in terms
of classical conservatism is an erroneous application of a tradition¬
alist principle.

But the enforcement of law by making visible and sometimes vivid the com¬
munity values that are deemed important enough to support by law, can
bolster these values. ... Of course, nothing in a society, least of all moral
sentiment, is permanent and final. Indeed, there have been occasions when
the law rightfully set out to change important and passionately held senti¬
ments, and the law proved to be a web of iron.

One such occasion, he argues, was the abrogation of the right of
owners of public accommodations to deny service to blacks, enacted
in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The exercise of this right
became “intolerably divisive” and therefore had to be abridged by
congressional action.

1 he most admirable achievements of modern liberalism — desegregation,
and the civil rights acts — were explicit and successful attempts to change

The Case of George Will

125

(among other things) individuals’ moral beliefs by compelling them to change
their behavior. The theory was that if government compelled people to eat
and work and study and play together, government would improve the inner
lives of those people.

Mr. Will is correct that “moral sentiment” does indeed change,
but absolute moral values do not, and only if we believe that egali¬
tarian values are superior to the rights of property can we accept
the legislation Mr. Will is defending as legitimate. Nor is it clear that
the civil rights revolution has really improved our “inner lives” or
even changed our external conduct to any great degree, and if it has,
the change has derived not only from government but also from
social and nonpublic sanctions as well. It is quite true that “state-
ways” can make “folkways,” that imposition of beliefs through co¬
ercion by an apparatus of power can eventually alter patterns of
thinking and conduct. The Christian emperors of Rome after Con¬
stantine certainly used the coercive power of the state to alter be¬
liefs and values, as did Henry VIII and his successors in the English
Reformation.

What the conservative wants to know, however, is by what author¬
ity a state undertakes such massive transformations and whether
what is gained compensates adequately for the damage that is inev¬
itably done. In the case of the suppression of paganism and its re¬
placement by Christianity, Christian conservatives will have little
doubt of the authority and ultimate v alue of the revolution. The
processes by which the civil rights revolution was accomplished are
more questionable. It is not clear they have led or will lead to more
justice and tolerance or to greater racial harmony. They certainly
did damage to the Constitution by allowing the national judicial and
legislative branches to override state and local laws. They also dam¬
aged the political culture by popularizing and legitimizing the idea
that every conceivable “minority” (women, sexual deviants, the
handicapped, and all racial and ethnic groups) may use the federal
government to satisfy its ambitions at the expense of local jurisdic¬
tions, the public treasury, and the social order. Nor is it clear on
what authority Congress overrode traditional property rights to
impose new rights. The exploitation of the national government to
abrogate and create rights by which the ambitions and private dog¬
mas of a faction may be satisfied is no less an instance of the degen-

126

Beautiful Losers

eration of modernism than the abuse of government by the constitu¬
encies of the welfare state. The civil rights revolution and the welfare
state are not, then, reactions against the tendencies of modernism as
Mr. Will presents them, but rather their fulfillment.

Indeed, for all his expostulations in favor of the highminded and
aristocratic enforcement of virtue, Mr. Will repeatedly expresses his
deference to the conventional and the popular. The rights of pro¬
prietors in 1964 “had become intolerably divisive,” so “conserva¬
tism properly understood” accepts the demands of those who initi¬
ated the division. “An American majority was unusually aroused,”
so authority must follow the majority. The welfare state is an idea
whose time “has now come,” so conservatives must accept the idea
and must not resist the times. “If conservatism is to engage itself
with the way we live now,” it must adapt itself to current circum¬
stances, and perish the thought that we might really change the way
we live now by rejecting the legacies of liberalism, dismantling its
power structure, and enforcing and protecting the real traditions of
the West. In place of that disturbing thought, Mr. Will invites us to
indulge his elegant pretense that such a conservative radicalism is
really what he supports, even as he snorts his open contempt for the
only force in American politics that has ever seriously proposed it.

Throughout Mr. Will’s articulation of what he takes to be conser¬
vatism there is an ambiguity or confusion between the respect for
tradition and a given way of life that animates genuine conserva¬
tives, on the one hand, and the desire to impose upon and “correct”
tradition by acts of power, on the other.

The primary business of conservatism is preservation of the social order that
has grown in all its richness — not preserving it like a fly in amber, but pro¬
tecting it especially from suffocation or dictated alteration by the state. How¬
ever, the state has a central role to play. The preservation of a nation requires
a certain minimum moral continuity, because a nation is not just “territory”
or “physical locality.” A nation is people “associated in agreement with re¬
spect to justice.” And continuity cannot be counted on absent precautions.

And similarly, “Proper conservatism holds that men and women are
biological facts, but that ladies and gentlemen fit for self-govern¬
ment are social artifacts, creations of the law.” Once again, Mr. Will’s
premise is unexceptionable, but there is no clarification of what the

The Case of George Will

127

role of the state, government, and law might properly be. The state
is certainly not the only agency that enforces morality, and while it
is true that “ladies and gentlemen” are indeed social artifacts, it is
untrue that they or many other social artifacts are “creations of the
law.”

Mr. Will is again correct that “the political question is always
which elites shall rule, not whether elites shall rule,” but elites do
not always rule by means of the formal apparatus of the state. They
also hold and exercise power, provide leadership, enforce public
morality, and inform culture through nongovernmental mechanisms
in the community, in business, in patronage of the arts and educa¬
tion, and in personal example. Only in the managerial bureaucratic
regimes of modernity have elites relied on the state for their power,
and they have done so only because the roots of their power and
leadership in society have been so shallow that they possess no other
institutions of support. That government has an important and le¬
gitimate role to play in enforcing public morality no serious conser¬
vative will doubt, but it is nevertheless a limited role and one that is
performed mainly not by government but by the institutions of society.

Mr. Will defines no clear limits either as to how far government
may go in enforcing moral improvement or how much man can be
improved, and on more than one occasion he appears to confuse the
legitimate role of the state in protecting the moral order with a kind
of environmentalist Pelagianism. Thus, he speaks of “the ancient
belief in a connection between human perfectibility and the politi¬
cal order,” although few ancients, pagan or Christian, and no con¬
servative of any time or faith ever believed in the perfectibility of
man. By failing to clarify the limits and precise functions of the state
in enforcing moral norms, Mr. Will fails to define classical conser¬
vatism adequately or to formulate a theoretical basis for distinguish¬
ing the legitimate and proper role of the state that conservatism
justifies from the statism and social engineering of the Left.

Mr. Will’s embrace of the modern bureaucratic state as a proper
means of encouraging “soulcraft” is neither realistic nor consistent
with the classical conservatism he purports to espouse. It is not
realistic because the bureaucratic state of this century is predicated
on and devoted to a continuing dynamic of moral and social deraci-
nation and cannot merely be adjusted to protect and sustain the

128

Beautiful Losers

moral and social order. It is inconsistent with classical conservatism
because classical conservatism flourished in and upheld an aristo¬
cratic and limited state that operated on predicates completely dif¬
ferent from those of its bloated, abused, alien, suffocating, and often
ineffectual modern descendant — “bureaucracy tempered by incom¬
petence,” as Evelyn Waugh described modern government.

Mr. Will’s ideology is consistent, however, with the agenda of
liberalism and the structures that carry out its agenda, and his self-
professed aim “to recast conservatism in a form compatible with the
broad popular imperatives of the day” is in fact an admission of his
acceptance of and deference to the liberal idols that modern state¬
craft adores. Although Mr. Will is sometimes called a neoconser¬
vative, he is not, actually. Neoconservatives typically try to derive
more or less conservative policy positions from essentially liberal
premises. Mr. Will in fact does the opposite: he seeks to derive from
more or less unexceptionable premises of classical conservatism
policy positions that are often congruent with the current liberal
agenda. It is because he accepts, and wants to be accepted by, the
“achievements” of modern liberalism and their champions that he
ignores or sneers at the serious conservative thinkers and leaders of
our time who have sought to break liberal idols and voices no criti¬
cism of the powers that support these idols. It is therefore not sur¬
prising that his commentary is welcomed in and rewarded by liberal
power centers. They have little to fear from him and his ideas and
much to gain if his version of “conservatism” should gain currency.
He enjoys every prospect of a bright future in their company.

The Other Side of Modernism

James Burnham and His Legacy

James Burnham died of cancer at his home in Kent, Connecticut,
on July 28, 1987, at the age of 81. Debilitated since 1978 by a stroke
that impaired the functioning of his memory, he had long since
ceased to write the fortnightly column “The Protracted Conflict” in
National Review , on the masthead of which his name had appeared
since its first issue in 1955- A reticent man by nature, Burnham by
the time of his death was not well known in either the national
intellectual community or even in the conservative movement with
which he had worked since the 1950s, and many today who are
pleased to call themselves conservatives confessed their ignorance
of who he was or what he had done. Although Burnham from the
1930s to the 1950s was a highly visible star in the New York intel¬
lectual constellation and continued his luminescence among New
York conservatives until his stroke, his death elicited barely a twinkle
from either the Right or the Left save among friends and former col¬
leagues. The indifference is all the more striking since President Rea¬
gan had seen fit to award Burnham the Presidential Medal of Free¬
dom in 1983 and issued a laudatory tribute to him after his death.

The neglect of Burnham by liberal and even mainstream media is
explained by many conservatives as the response to be expected
from those whose incantations to the broad mind and the open mouth
are belied by their contempt for those who dissent from their can¬
ons. Yet Burnham was also neglected by many conservatives, who
knew him best through his column and his classic Suicide of the
West , repeatedly reprinted since its first publication in 1964. George
H. Nash in his monumental The Conservative Intellectual Move¬
ment in America since 1945 acknowledges Burnhams importance
in the emergence of conservative anticommunism in the 1940s and
1950s, but neither Mr. Nash nor most other students of American
conservatism have fully appreciated the significance of Burnham’s
political ideas or their potential for constructing a serious and criti¬
cal political theory for the contemporary American Right.

129

130

Beautiful Losers

Burnham did not generally socialize with the conservative move¬
ment. He was not a member of the Philadelphia or Mont Pelerin
societies, rarely contributed to conservative periodicals other than
National Review, and seldom or never participated in the seminars
and summer schools of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or Young
Americans for Freedom. His aloofness was probably in part a per¬
sonal choice, but it also reflected an incongruity between his mind
and that of the mainstream of American conservatism as it has de¬
veloped since the 1940s. Burnham and his more percipient readers
were aware of the incongruity, which served to keep him at a dis¬
tance from many of his professional collaborators on the Right, while,
ironically, causing the Left to concentrate its fire on his writings to a
greater degree than on those of any other conservative intellectual
figure of our era.

Until fairly recently, the mainstream of American conservative
thought could be divided into two camps, generally called liber¬
tarian and traditionalist. The former centered on individual rights
and the limitations of the state and emphasized the free market as a
means of solving social and economic problems. The traditionalist
wing of conservatism focused on the duties of men in a historic
continuum and emphasized authority, order, and religious and eth¬
ical virtue. Although subsidiary and eclectic bodies of opinion flour¬
ished. and though some like the late Frank S. Meyer sought to formu¬
late a “fusionist” school that bridged the contradictions between
libertarians and traditionalists, these were the generally predomi¬
nant currents among American conservatives until the 1970s. At
that time, with the rise of the New Right and neoconservatism, which
are less schools of political thought than political and policy move¬
ments, the clear dual framework of conservative thought began to
break up.

James Burnham belonged to neither the libertarian nor the tradi¬
tionalist category, though his thought was not merely a bridge be¬
tween them. He often endorsed governmental action in the econ¬
omy and was strongly criticized by libertarians such as Murray
Rothbard and Edith Efron for his fundamental ideas of man and
society. Yet while these ideas emphasized order, authority, and power,
they were rather clearly distinct from those expressed by orthodox
traditionalists.

i

The Other Side of Modernism

131

The religious and ethical orientation of traditionalism has led it to
look to premodern thought, classical and medieval, for its ideas on
social and political order. Indeed, traditionalist conservatives gen¬
erally identify themselves in opposition to what they call “moder¬
nity” and its legacy. As traditionalist Stephen J. Tonsor defined the
concept in a noted address to the Philadelphia Society, later reprinted
\n National Review, in 1986:

By “modernity” I mean that revolutionary movement in culture which de¬
rived from a belief in man’s radical alienation, in God’s unknowability or
non-existence, and in man’s capacity to transform or remake the conditions
of his existence. The thorough going secularism, the attack upon the past,
religious and social, aristocratic or bourgeois, the utopian dream of aliena¬
tion overcome and innocence restored are all linked together in the modern¬
ist sensibility. . . . The Romantic Satanic hero is the same man as the Pro¬
metheus of Shelley and Marx, the Zarathustra of Nietzsche. 1

“Modernism” in the view of Dr. Tonsor and other adherents of tradi¬
tionalist thought (most notably, Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, Richard
Weaver, and Leo Strauss, among others) cuts man off from the tran¬
scendent. Hence, modernism denies or ignores God and concen¬
trates on secular knowledge and action. Human knowledge can be
only empirical; moral statements can be only relative or factual,
there being a dichotomy between fact and value; and human action
cannot be modeled on transcendent or spiritual goods that either
do not exist or cannot be known. Hence, science, the amoral and
empirical description of nature, is the characteristically modern way
of knowing, and technology, the application of science to practice,
is the typically modern way of doing.

While traditionalists bring philosophical and religious arguments
against modernism, their major practical argument against it is its
political implications. Denying the absolute and transcendent sources
of moral values, modernism has no grounds for resisting tyranny or
controlling anarchy. In Dr. Tonsor’s view, “We can see that the de¬
nial of the existence of order as the ground of being, and the rejec¬
tion of the transcendent, are a one-way street to Dachau. If every¬
thing is permitted and the will to power is the only reality, then the

1. Stephen J. Tonsor, “Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative,” National Review,
June 20, 1986.

132

Beautiful Losers

Gulag is as logical as an Euler diagram.”2 Modern political thought
from the time of Machiavelli and modern liberalism from the time of
Mill have rejected the idea of an absolute moral order to which
social and political institutions should conform and in the absence
of a basis for firm moral judgments are unable to distinguish between
dissent and subversion, friend and enemy, right and wrong, or to
exercise power in the interests of justice and a morally based social
order.

W hat is striking about the political thought of James Burnham,
however, is that it is distinctively modernist. This was true not only
of his post-Marxist period in the early 1940s. when he published
The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, but also of
his final period from the mid-1950s onward, when he was identi¬
fiable conservative. In The Machiavellians , which remained the
fundamental statement of his general theoretical political frame¬
work. he explored the school of political thought extending from
Machiavelli to his positivist heirs of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Roberto Michels, and
Georges Sorel. The conclusion of the book was that there exists a
“science of power” that can describe the general laws of human
political behavior based on inferences from historical experience.
“The recurring pattern of change expresses the more or less perma¬
nent core of human nature as it functions politically. The instability
of all governments and political forms follows in part from the lim¬
itless human appetite for power.”3

Burnhams emphasis on “the limitless human appetite for power”
places him in the camp of moderns such as Nietzsche and x\lfred
Adler (and of later sociobiologists who write of the “imperial ani¬
mal” and “instincts of dominance”) and of other exponents of an
essentially irrationalist depiction of human nature such as Dostoev¬
sky, Conrad. Freud, and Pareto himself. The “science of power” that
discovers and explores this human appetite is itself a product of
empirical observation. It was through such observation, either of
the historical past or of contemporaries, that Machiavelli and his

2. Ibid.

3. James Burnham. The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John
Day Company, 1943), 63.

The Other Side of Modernism

133

heirs constructed this science, and, unlike the medieval Dante, with
whom Burnham contrasts Machiavelli, they did so by eschewing the
“formal” for the “real.” “By ‘real meaning,’” wrote Burnham, “I
refer to the meaning not in terms of the fictional world of religion,
metaphysics, miracles, and pseudo-history . . . but in terms of the
actual world of space, time, and events.”4

The predominant elements of Burnham’s thought separate him
from the ethical absolutes around which premodern and contem¬
porary traditionalist ideas center. Whereas the latter sought to con¬
strain power and the human appetites by ethical precepts and reli¬
gious institutions, Burnham was specific in rejecting this effort:

The Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about
power . . . the primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own
interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. . . . No theory, no prom¬
ises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power.
Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders nor businessmen, neither
bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use
which they will seek to make of power. . . . Only power restrains power. . . .
when all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power
may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by
accident.5

Burnham thus harbored no illusion that a particular form of soci¬
ety — agrarian, theocratic, or feudal, much less socialist, liberal, or
democratic — could adequately restrain the appetite for power. What
could restrain it was a balanced distribution of power among vari¬
ous social and political forces that mutually checked the power of
each other and in the conflict of which both political freedom and
the level of civilization could flourish. Although his idea of balance
derived from Machiavelli, Mosca, and Pareto, it had its roots in clas¬
sical thinkers like Cicero and Polybius; but Burnham’s adherence to
what Ralf Dahrendorf would call a “conflict model” of society, like
that of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Marx, is more distinctively modern
than the “consensus model” of most classical and medieval thinkers

4. Ibid., 9-10. In the 1963 edition of The Machiavellians (Chicago: Henry Reg-
nery Company, 1963) Burnham changed the word fictional to the more ambiguous
m ythical (11).

5. Burnham, The Machiavellians { 1943), 24 6-47.

134

Beautiful Losers

such as Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas, as well as Burke. In the latter
concept of society, men form society because they are naturally
sociable, and a shared consensus, based on religious and moral be¬
liefs and transmitted through tradition, provides a restraint on hu¬
man conduct. In the conflict model, consensual elements are at best
subordinate, and consensus itself is a product of conflict and even¬
tually of domination by one social force. Thus, for Machiavelli, reli¬
gion is imposed on the citizens by the legislator or prince for the
purpose of internal discipline, and Marx’s “ideology,” Pareto’s “der¬
ivations,” Sorel’s “myth,” and Mosca’s “political formula” are analo¬
gous concepts.

It might be argued that a book published in 1943, when Burnham
was not yet forty years old, bears only tangential relevance to his
later thought. Yet there is no clear break between Burnham of The
Machiavellians and his later books and articles. Indeed, the same
themes, though less bluntly stated, are found in most of his later
work. The last book review that Burnham published6 in 1978 was a
highly favorable account of the autobiography of A. J. Ayer, a lead¬
ing logical positivist, and in his obituaries of Andre Malraux and
Pablo Picasso in National Review , Burnham specifically invoked
Nietzsche’s “will to power”:

What defines the essence of the superman (or merely, “superior man,” as the
German can also be translated) is his creation of his own values, thus also his
rejection of, or indifference to, all values the origin and authority of which
are external to himself in custom, church, tribe, or state. . . . For Nietzsche,
the supermen were not the conquerors and rulers, who were in fact often as
much slaves of convention and prejudice as the servile masses, but above all
the supreme poets and artists, the prophets, and the wilder of the saints. . . .
Supermen are more dangerous than H-bombs. The world can’t digest very
many of them, but it would be a drearier place if there weren’t any.7

I

Burnham developed a similar theme of power expressed in art (and
religion) in a column of 1961, where he saw Piero della Francisco’s

6. James Burnham, “Mind and Manner,” review of A. J. Ayer, Part of My Life, Na¬
tional Review (March 3, 1978): 287-88.

“Pablo Picasso, RIP,” National Review (April 27, 1973)^56; the obituary is
unsigned; 1 owe the fact of Burnham’s authorship to National Review editor Joseph
Sobran; see also Burnham’s signed obituary of Andre Malraux, National Review
(December 24, 1976): 1392-93, where Nietzsche is also invoked.

The Other Side of Modernism

135

fresco of the Resurrection as an allegory of the decline of the West,
symbolized by the sleeping Roman sentries and the emergence of a
triumphant enemy symbolized by Christ,

a Christ that has none of the physical weakness or effeminacy with which He
is so often painted. Piero’s risen Christ has thrown His shroud, like a cloak,
over His shoulder, to reveal a spear-slashed breast that, though gaunt, is strong
and hard-muscled; in His right hand He holds the standard of an unfurled
white banner, quartered by a red cross; His glance, directed straight out, is
majestic, terrible, almost — through the effect of those eyes that seem to stare
to infinity without particular focus — obsessive. . . . What we are looking at
in Piero’s picture, among so many other things, is the power and wealth and
luxury of Rome gone soft and sluggish, asleep instead of alert and on guard.
The closed eyes of the sentries in their handsome dress cannot see, do not
even try to see, the fierce Phoenix rising from the gathering ashes of their
world. «

In both Congress and the American Tradition and Suicide of the
West, Burnham focused on the irrational and mythic forces of tradi¬
tion and ideology, and throughout his work he analyzed the basic
social and political conflict between an ascendant managerial elite,
using Marxist and liberal ideology as a vehicle of its power, and a
declining bourgeois class expressing “conservative” and “classical
liberal” ideas to resist managerial dominance. In one of the last
columns he wrote prior to his stroke, he again eschewed the moral-
ism and ideology that characterized both the Left and the Right:

The primary goals at which I aim in this column, as in most of the books and
articles I have written, are fact and analysis. I do not accept any theory of
class, national, ethnic, partisan, or sectarian truth. If conclusions I reach are
true, they are just as true for Russians as for Americans, for pagans as for
Christians, and for blacks as for whites.8 9

Burnham, then, represents modernism in a dimension very differ¬
ent from that depicted by Dr. Tonsor and other orthodox antimodern
traditionalists. While this school is correct in pointing to one side of

8. James Burnham, The War We Are In: The Last Decade and the Next (New Ro¬
chelle, N. Y.. Arlington House, 1967), 309-10; the column is entitled “Sleeping Sen¬
tries,” published in National Review (June 17, 196l):377-78, 381.

9. James Burnham, “No Entangling Alliances, Please,” National Review (September
15, 1978): 1132.

136

Beautiful Losers

modernist thought as a vehicle for revolutionary and secular mille-
narian ends, there is also another side to modernism, represented by
Machiavelli himself, Montesquieu. Hume, and Madison, to name but
a few of its early representatives. Although this body of thought is
modernist in its general secularism, its reliance on empirical and
historicist rather than metaphysical or rationalistic methods of in¬
quiry, its avoidance of moral absolutism, its pessimistic and skep¬
tical portrayal of human irrationality and the inherent appetitive
forces of human nature, and its elaboration of a theory of “balance”
rather than transcendence or moral virtue as a means of restraining
human nature, it very clearly rejects the possibility of what Tonsor
calls “man’s capacity to transform or remake the conditions of his
existence” and the chiliasm attendant on it. Such secular transfor¬
mationalism, “immanentization of the eschaton,” in Voegelin’s
phrase, is, in fact, an importation from secularized Judeo-Christian
thought and. as not only Voegelin but also James Billington and the
late Frances Yates have shown, lies at the root of modernist revolu¬
tionary totalitarianism. The other side of modernism that James
Burnham represented leads not to Dachau and the Gulag but to the
classical republicanism that originally informed the Framers of the
American republic.

Burnham’s modernism alienated those traditionalist conservatives
who were aware of it. Their minds tend to center on the more ethe¬
real regions of religion, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics, rather
than on the sociological analysis of political conflict and the geo¬
politics of global struggle, and they are not attracted to and are often
repelled by a worldview that centers on conflict, power, and human
irrationality. Whittaker Chambers, whose own mind reflected a ten¬
sion between modernism and antimodern elements and who ex¬
pressed deep admiration for Burnham, nevertheless criticized him
for his “prudent, practical thinking.” “The Fire Bird,” wrote Cham¬
bers, “is glimpsed living or not at all. In other words, realists have a
way of missing truth, which is not invariably realistic.” 10 The “Fire
Bird" refers to the classical myth of the phoenix, a bird composed

10. Whittaker Chambers, Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to
U illiatn F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961 , ed. and with notes by William F. Buckley. Jr.
(New York:G. P. Putnams Sons, 1969). 1 55, January 23, 1957, Chambers to Buckley.

The Other Side of Modernism

137

of fire that, since it was consumed by flames as it flew through the
air, left no body. Its existence therefore could not be proved empiri¬
cally, by finding its body; it had to be seen alive or not at all. Cham¬
bers’s meaning is that Burnham’s worldview demanded empirical
proof for things that by their nature could not be proved but were
nevertheless known to be true by those who had seen — or felt or
intuited — them.

If both contemporary conservative traditionalists and libertar¬
ians were at odds with the contours of Burnham’s thought, the Left
found itself attracted to it and yet at the same time repelled. Burn¬
ham’s The Managerial Revolution was strongly criticized by
C. Wright Mills, Ralf Dahrendorf, and other sociologists of the Left,
who saw its thesis as a direct threat to their own Marxist and neo-
Marxist analyses of contemporary power relations in capitalist soci¬
ety. George Orwell also wrote long essays on Burnham in which he
sought to deflect the criticisms that Burnham, from his perspective
of modernist realism, raised against the utopian formalism of the
Leftist mind. Similar critiques greeted Burnham’s analysis of the
Cold War and communism, until, in the early 1930s, his refusal to
denounce Joseph McCarthy led to his virtual expulsion from north¬
eastern intellectual circles. Yet the Left, unlike much of the Right,
recognized Burnham’s preeminence, and in 1950 David Riesman
could write in The Lonely Crowd of “Marx, Mosca, Michels, Pareto,
Weber, Veblen, or Burnham” in the same sentence.1 1 The Left per¬
ceived that Burnham’s inversion of modernism was a far more serious
threat to it than the antimodern traditionalism that many conser¬
vatives represented, since Burnham’s counter-modernism threat¬
ened to remove the philosophical grounds from under the feet of
the Left and leave it with no basis for its political ideology.

The American Right, for all its intellectual sophistication and po¬
litical progress, has yet to come to terms with or make use of the
implications of Burnham’s thought. Libertarianism is a modernist
ideology, but it does not turn modernism aw7ay from the interpreta¬
tion the Left has imposed on it. Neoconservatism, as Tonsor argues,

1 1 . David Riesman, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crou d: A
Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1950), 252.

138

Beautiful Losers

is also modernist, but it too refuses to challenge the conventional
drift of modernism. Neoconservatives rely on an eclectic assimila¬
tion of liberal, libertarian, and traditionalist ideas, and seek only to
achieve “piecemeal” or gradualist changes within a conventionally
modernist framework. Most of the journalism and propaganda that
has issued from the New Right and neoconservatives cannot be taken
seriously as political and social thought. Orthodox traditionalism
rejects modernism, but does so in a manner that is largely alien and
inexplicable to the modern mind and tends to degenerate into cult-
ism. Among contemporary conservatives only James Burnham of¬
fered a theoretical framework and a practical application of mod¬
ernist political ideas that challenge the conventional modernist
categories as defined by the Left. When the American Right begins
to understand and accept his legacy, it will begin to glimpse a more
enduring victory in the protracted domestic and global conflict in
w hich Burnham was enlisted.

The Evil That Men Don’t Do

Joe McCarthy and the American Right

His is probably the most hated name in American history. Other
villains — Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg — today evoke merely the esoteric passions of the anti¬
quarian or the interminable controversies of partisans. Only Joe
McCarthy has given his name to an enduring term of political abuse,
and in American politics todays there is literally no one who would
publicly defend him. When he died, eminent public men could find
no good to say of him. Vandals in Appleton, Wisconsin, have repeat¬
edly desecrated his grave, and nearly thirty years after his death, his
ghost continues to haunt us, called up only by his old enemies to
frighten us of what we once became, to warn us of what we might
become again.

It is not immediately clear why so much hatred should endure so
long, especially when it is recalled that the senator was never accused
or convicted of any crime, never betrayed his country, caused no
wars, perpetrated no atrocities, and after 1946 never even lost an
election. The reason usually given for the hatred of McCarthy^ is that
he did and said so many evil things. That he has a reputation for
doing and saying evil cannot be denied. We are told that McCarthy
made reckless accusations of treason, and he often or always failed
to substantiate his charges. He made vitriolic attacks on his oppo¬
nents and publicly challenged their good faith and integrity. He
interfered with the workings of the State Department and the army.
He sent his aides on a junket to Europe, where they made fools of
themselves and embarrassed the United States. He ruined the careers
of many — hundreds, thousands — of innocent people. He encour¬
aged mass hysteria, played on fear and resentment, and harmed the
cause of responsible anticommunism. He violated the rules of the
Senate as well as the standards of common decency . He physically
attacked Drew Pearson. He lost his temper, bullied witnesses, talked
dirty, and drank too much. He insulted such devoted public ser¬
vants and stalwart patriots as Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson, Harry

139

i

140

Beautiful Losers

Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall. He tried to link
Stevenson with Alger Hiss, and he made attorney Joseph Welch cry
on national television. Perhaps worst of all, when journalists or other
senators called McCarthy a liar, a criminal, an extremist, a homosex¬
ual, or a fraud, he paid them back in the same coin with his dis¬
tinctive gift for invective. Joe McCarthy said and did all these things
and more, and the evil that inheres in them lives after him and recoils
upon us to this day in the hatred that attaches to his cursed name.

Once in a while, however, someone who marches to the tune of a
different drummer points out that Joe McCarthy did not do some of
the evil things that were done in and around his era. He did not, for
example, make solemn commitments to anticommunist allies of the
United States, as Franklin Roosevelt did to Chiang Kai-shek, and
then violate those commitments at the first opportunity. He did not,
like General Eisenhower, initiate “Operation Keelhaul,” in which
untold numbers of anticommunist Russians were delivered to the
Soviets at the point of American bayonets in the aftermath of World
War II. He did not make agreements with Joseph Stalin that con¬
signed an entire subcontinent to communism and then announce
the Yalta agreements as an act of prudent statecraft. He did not send
American troops to Korea, and later to Vietnam, and then deny
them the full support of American military power while their death
tolls mounted. He did not allow the Hungarians who revolted against
communist domination to be shot or rounded up by Soviet tanks
and Mongolian troops. He did not sponsor an invasion of commu¬
nist Cuba, withdraw promised air support at the last minute, and
leave the invaders to be slaughtered by Castro’s armies. He did not
countenance the overthrow and murder of President Diem and his
brother, plunge an anticommunist ally into chaos from which it
never recovered, and later sign a peace treaty that ensured commu¬
nist control of South Vietnam and make excuses while the Commu¬
nists ignored the treaty, conquered the ally, and defeated the United
States for the first time in its history. He did not embark on foreign
and defense policies that permitted the most savage and aggressive
tyranny in world history to become the equal of the United States in
strategic weapons and pronounce it a step for a generation of peace.
Perhaps most of all, McCarthy did not, in the wake of Alger Hiss, the
Amerasia case, the Rosenbergs, and other lesser treasons, ignore,

The Evil That Men Don 7 Do

141

ridicule, scorn, and work against those Americans who knew the
extent of communist infiltration in the federal government and ob¬
struct most substantial measures to expose it and bring it to an end.

Joe McCarthy did not do any of these things, which were usually
done or authorized or approved or supported by many of the persons
and institutions he attacked, and they, like much of what McCarthy
did, were also evil, among the most evil things in our history, and
most of us have forgotten them and even wonder if they really hap¬
pened or if anyone really did them. The evil that never happened,
that other men didn’t do, died with them and lies interred with the
bones of its victims — not hundreds or thousands but millions —
whose ghosts are never invoked and who have largely disappeared
from human memory; but if there is a Bar of Justice beyond this
world and beyond human memory, I would rather stand before it
and answer for the evil that Joe McCarthy did than for the evil that
he didn’t do.

The real reason for the hatred borne by the name of Joe McCarthy
has little to do with the evil that is attributed to him or with his
uncompromising anticommunism but rather with what he discovered
about the forces — the people, ideas, and institutions — that by 1950
had come to dominate American government and public discourse
and with what he communicated and exposed to the American peo¬
ple about those forces. McCarthy not only claimed that a commu¬
nist presence had entered into the federal government but also that
noncommunist or ostensibly anticommunist elements in the gov¬
ernment and more broadly in the national elite were in some sense
“soft” on or sympathetic to communism and, consequently, that
they lacked the resolution to extirpate the internal communist pres¬
ence and deal effectively with communism abroad. Even more, he
suggested that the connection between the elite and the forces of
subversion and aggression was in itself an indictment of the elite,
regardless of whether its members were formally affiliated with
communism, whether they had actually committed espionage or
treason in a legal sense, or whether they verbally espoused opposi¬
tion to communism. McCarthy, in other words, was not principally
concerned with the issue of communism in government but with
the relationship between communism and the elite, or establish¬
ment, and because his concern necessarily involved a militant chal-

142

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lenge to and a rejection of the elite, it launched a massive political
and verbal counterattack upon him, crushed him and the movement
he created, and transformed him into the demonic embodiment of
evil that moves among us even today.

McCarthy’s contention about the dominant forces in American
society was, of course, never presented explicitly or in general terms
and was usually expressed in hyperbole and ad hominem. It is quite
true that McCarthy often exaggerated and overdramatized the con¬
nections between the establishment and the more clearly subversive
forces, but it was precisely that dramatization that enabled large
numbers of Americans to perceive the connection at all. It is proba¬
bly also true that McCarthy himself did not think of his rhetoric as a
device for political and didactic purposes but that he accepted his
own dramatization as literal truth. Taken literally, however, much of
what McCarthy habitually said was absurd. His notorious attack on
Adlai Stevenson — ‘Alger, I mean Adlai" — linked two men who had
little real association and who were quite distinct on a literal level.
Yet it was the point of his attack that Adlai and Alger did share some
important things in common besides their stuffiness. The great vir¬
tue of McCarthy consisted precisely in his ability to communicate to
the average American what the bonds were that connected estab¬
lishment liberals like Stevenson and crypto-Communists like Hiss.
McCarthy’s rhetoric pointed directly to what they shared, isolated
it, and held it up, squirming and screaming, for all the American
nation to see. And what the nation saw, it did not like.

Between approximately 1930 and 1950 the United States experi¬
enced a social and political revolution in which one elite was largely
displaced from power by another. The new elite, entrenching itself
in the management of large corporations and unions, the federal
bureaucracy, and the centers of culture, education, and communica¬
tion, articulated an ideology that expressed its interests and de¬
fended its dominance under the label of liberalism. Although liber¬
alism formally defines itself in opposition to communism, in fact it
retains and incorporates some of the basic premises of Marxist doc¬
trine — in particular, the idea that human beings are the products of
their social environment and that by rationalistic management of
the environment it is possible to perfect or ameliorate significantly
the human condition and indeed man himself. The environmen-

The Evil That Men Don 7 Do

143

talist and ultimately utopian premises of liberalism are the justifica¬
tion for the expansion of state and bureaucracy, the regulation of the
economy, the redistribution of wealth, and the imposition of pro¬
gressive education and egalitarian experiments on traditional insti¬
tutions and communities by liberal agencies and policies. In foreign
affairs, the premises of liberalism hold out the prospect of an “end
to war” through the transcendence of nationalism and international
rivalry and the evolution or conscious design of a cosmopolitan
world order in which war, empire, sovereignty, and significant na¬
tional and cultural differentiations among peoples have disappeared.
It so happens that the ideology of liberalism, for all its contempt for
“special interests,” coincides very conveniently with the political,
economic, and professional interests of the bureaucrats, social engi¬
neers, managers, and intellectuals who believe in it and who are
most zealous in pressing for its agenda. Without liberalism or some
such formula under another name, these groups cannot easily explain
or justify the power, prestige, and rewards that they hold. By the late
1940s, due to the crises and power vacuums created by the Great
Depression, two world wars, and the advance of technical knowl¬
edge and skill, this complex of special interests and its ideology had
secured an essentially dominant, though not exclusive, influence in
the strategic power centers of American society. In a word, the ris¬
ing liberal elite had become a liberal establishment.

The environmentalist premises of liberalism, its social engineer¬
ing methods, and its utopian or meliorist implications are not funda¬
mentally distinct from those of communism, and indeed the two
ideologies share common roots in the pleasant fantasies of the En¬
lightenment as well as in what Whittaker Chambers called “man’s
second oldest faith,” the promise of which “was whispered in the
first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ ’M Given the common premises and
roots shared by members of the new elite and by Communists, it is
not terribly surprising that they could work together in administra¬
tions and institutions committed to the premises. Nor is it surpris¬
ing that liberals often failed to recognize the Communists among
them or, when their presence was pointed out, that they often failed

1. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), 9.

144

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to sec them or the significance of their presence or even to express
very much concern about it. Finally, it is not surprising either that
some who began as liberals found themselves frustrated by the com¬
promises and slow pace of conventional politics and, faced with the
emergencies of global war and economic chaos, were ineluctably
drawn toward and into support for the more muscular tactics of
Lenin and Stalin. Liberal ideology and the expectations it creates in
the minds of those who believe it do not conduce to caution, nor do
they discourage the mental habit of dividing the world into the
simple dichotomies of the Manichean under the labels of “progres¬
sive” and “reactionary.” “Thus,” wrote Chambers, “men who sin¬
cerely abhorred the word Communism, in the pursuit of common
ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from
themselves, except that it was just the Communists who were likely
to be most forthright and most dedicated in the common cause.”2

The discovery of communist infiltration, then, was not the prin¬
cipal meaning of McCarthy’s activities, although it cannot be doubted
that he did indeed discover and expose Communists in sensitive
positions and, more importantly perhaps, the indifference of the
new elite in government to their presence. On February 23, 1954,
for example, Mrs. Mary Stalcup Markward, who had worked for the
FBI as an undercover informant in the Communist party in Wash¬
ington, D.C. and had had access to party membership files, testified
under oath before McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investi¬
gations and identified Mrs. Annie Lee Moss, a civilian employee of
the Army Signal Corps, as having been to her knowledge a member
of the Communist party. Mrs. Moss, testifying under oath also, later
denied this accusation and, because she appeared to be almost com¬
pletely uneducated, was believed by many to be a most unlikely
Communist. The Markward testimony was thus not widely credited
at the time, and the incident appeared to be an embarrassment for
Senator McCarthy.

In the course of her testimony, however, Mrs. Moss had mentioned
her address as “72 R Street, S.W.,” Washington, D.C. In 1958 the
Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), weighing the credibil¬
ity of Markward as a witness, obtained access to the membership

2. Ibid., 4^2.

The Evil That Men Don ’t Do

145

files of the Washington-area Communist party, which had been seized
by the FBI. These files, the authenticity of which the party did not
challenge, contained a record of one Annie Lee Moss, living at 72 R
Street, S.W. in Washington. Although the SACB, in a ruling of 1959,
found that “Markward’s testimony should be assayed with caution,”
this reassessment by the board had nothing to do with the Moss
case. Nor did it involve an insinuation of lying or unreliability on the
part of Markward but rather a conflict of interpretation of how she
had been compensated by the FBI. Moreover, even while urging cau¬
tion in regard to Markward’s testimony, the SACB concluded that a
finding that Markward “palpably lied or that she testified in this or
other proceedings to a deliberate series of falsehoods” would not be
warranted and that “in the few instances relied upon, Markward is,
with two minor exceptions, corroborated by other credited evi¬
dence.”3 Given Markward’s unequivocal identification of Moss as a
party member, the substantiation of the identification by a bipar¬
tisan and independent board through the discovery of Moss’s name
and address in party membership files, and the absence of any rea¬
son to believe that Markward had lied, the conclusion that Moss was
a Communist is inescapable.

Another such case made public by McCarthy is that of Edw ard M.
Rothschild, an employee of the Government Printing Office, w ho
was described under oath by his fellow worker James B. Phillips on
August 17, 1953, as having attended meetings in 1938 for the pur¬
pose of forming a Communist party cell in the GPO. Mrs. Markward
also testified under oath the same day that she had known Roth¬
schild’s wife, Esther, as a member of the Communist party. Roth¬
schild himself had earlier acknowledged that he was in a position at
the GPO to obtain access to classified information that was being
printed and assembled there, but he had denied actually having done
so. The witness Phillips related an incident in which he had ob¬
served another employee try to steal classified data. When asked if
they were Communists, both Mr. and Mrs. Rothschild took the Fifth

3. U.S., Subversive Activities Control Board, Reports, 4 vols. (Washington: Gov¬
ernment Printing Office, 1966), 1 :93-94, 99; see also the account of the Moss case in
Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York:
Stein and Day, 1982), 548-50, 567-69, 767-68, n. 12. Reeves states. “Either Mrs
Markward or Mrs. Moss was lying" (568).

146

Beautiful Losers

Amendment. There was no reason to doubt the testimony of Phillips
and Markward, and because of McCarthy’s hearing Rothschild was
discharged from his position in the GPO.4

In neither the Moss nor the Rothschild case was a major espionage
investigation involved. Their significance is not that Moss and Roth¬
schild were equivalent to Alger Hiss or Kim Philby but that the in¬
formation publicized by McCarthy’s hearings had been presented to
the appropriate security authorities by the FBI some years before. In
the case of Moss, the FBI had offered a witness against her to the
Army and to the Civil Service Commission in 1951, three years
before McCarthy’s hearing, and both had ignored the Bureau and
the witness. In the Rothschild case, the FBI had made known to the
GPO as early as 1943 — ten years before McCarthy’s hearings — that
information on the Rothschilds’ communist activities was available.
In 1948 the Bureau offered a list of forty witnesses against Roth¬
schild to the Loyalty Board of the GPO, but not one was called. In
195 1 the FBI had provided more information on Rothschild, but the
GPO, under new security rules formulated by the Eisenhower Ad¬
ministration, cleared him in 1953. 5 For all of the rhetoric about the
“stringent” security rules established under Truman and Eisenhower,
those who administered these rules were often either too indifferent
or too incompetent — these are the most charitable interpretations —
to avail themselves of reliable evidence on the presence of Communists
and security risks in sensitive positions of the federal government.

The Moss and Rothschild cases are only two relatively clear in¬
stances in which McCarthy exposed the presence of Communists or
subversives in government. His investigation of security risks in the
defense establishment in 1954 led to the removal of more than thirty
individuals from employment in defense plants as a result of their
having been identified as Communists by witnesses before his sub¬
committee. When confronted with these accusations and provided
opportunities to respond, these individuals had generally taken the
Fifth Amendment — i.e., refused to state whether they had been or

4. See Security — Government Printing Office, Hearings before the Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, U.S.
Senate, 83rd Congress, 1st Session, Part 1, August Hand 18, 1953; Roy Cohn, McCarthy
(New York: New American Library, 1968), 53; Reeves, McCarthy , 509-11 .

5. Reeves, McCarthy, 548, 509-10.

The Evil That Men Don Y Do

147

were Communists and often whether they had committed espio¬
nage.6 Perhaps they all were high-minded civil libertarians who
merely took the Fifth on principle, but perhaps also there is no
reason for persons who refuse to deny they are Communists or spies
to work in defense plants.

The case of Owen Lattimore, first accused by McCarthy and later
found by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to have been "a
conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy” — a judg¬
ment based on the testimony of ex-Soviet diplomatic and intelli¬
gence officers and of former Ambassador William Bullitt, as well as
on analysis of Lattimore ’s own publications, the statements of ex-
Communist witness Louis Budenz, and other evidence — is another
complicated but reasonably conclusive instance of McCarthy’s dis¬
covery of a Communist.7 In addition, there are a number of cases
first publicized by McCarthy in which the evidence is not conclu¬
sive but highly suggestive — patterns of association, membership in
communist front organizations, political activities, and public state¬
ments — of communist or procommunist sympathies or of inability
to make responsible judgments about communism.8 The cliche that
“McCarthy never discovered a single communist,” repeated ad nau¬
seam by the performing dogs of the academic branch of the elite, is
simply untrue.

Nevertheless, it was not the minutiae of congressional investiga¬
tions and the administration of federal laws and regulations that
created McCarthy’s following, nor did they significantly contribute
to the hatred of him that the new elite exhibited. Had McCarthy
announced, in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, the
discovery of Communists in labor unions rather than in the State
Department, his speech would have attracted little notice. The State

6. Cohn, McCarthy, 55-56; see also Subversion and Espionage in Defense Es¬
tablishments and Industry, Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Inves¬
tigations of the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Senate, 83rd Congress,
1st and 2nd Sessions, 1953-1954.

7. Institute of Pacific Relations, Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S.
Senate, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, July 2, 1952, 214-18, for summary of the evi¬
dence against Lattimore.

8. See William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies: The
Record and Its Meaning, 1954, reprint (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 19“’0),
esp. chap. 7 and app. A, 343-5 l ; and Cohn, McCarthy.

148

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Department and the individuals whom McCarthy proceeded to iden¬
tify by name were at the heart of the establishment and its agenda,
and when McCarthy made bald assertions about their connections
to communism, he was launching an attack upon the establishment
that it could not ignore and which it could reciprocate only with
hatred. Other criticisms of the elite from the Right — of its economic
and foreign policies or of the constitutionality of its legal measures —
did not challenge its fundamental legitimacy or its basic loyalty and
integrity, nor did they generally suggest that the establishment was
a distinct social and political, as well as an ideological, formation,
implicitly and inherently alien and hostile to the mainstream of the
nation. Hatred and destruction of McCarthy were the only possible
responses to this kind of attack. Thomas Reeves says in his large
biography of McCarthy that he is our King John. It may be more
appropriate to say that he is the liberals’ Trotsky, their Emmanuel
Goldstein, their Jew. His very existence was a threat to their inter¬
ests and power and was ultimately incompatible with their domi¬
nance in the United States.

It was McCarthy’s accomplishment to infuse into the American
Right the militancy of a counterrevolutionary movement, and the
large following he attracted tends to confirm that there was indeed
what Chambers called a “jagged fissure” between the elite and the
“plain men and women of the nation”9 on the issue of the rela¬
tionship between the elite and communism. The militant anti-lib¬
eral and anticommunist movement that McCarthy was the first to
instigate also underlay the Gold water movement of the early 1960s,
the Wallace following of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the
“New Right” of the last decade.

Every time these mass expressions of anti-liberalism have ap¬
peared, mainstream conservatives and the Republican party have
hastened to take political advantage of them and use them to gain
political office — as Eisenhower did in 1952, Nixon in 1968, and
Reagan in 1980. Yet every time also, those who gained office have
proceeded to ignore, to compromise, or actually to betray the con¬
stituency on which their officeholding was based. They have done

9. Chambers. W itness . ”93.

The Evil That Men Don Y Do

149

so because they are themselves part of or closely connected to the
elite against which this constituency is mobilized.

In recent years, particularly under the Reagan Administration,
attempts have been made to formulate a more “responsible,” a more
“credible” and “respectable,” version of conservatism that pays lip
service to the anti-liberal and antiestablishment (populist, if you
will) constituency but which in fact seeks to defuse its militancy
and consolidate it into the apparatus of elite power. It is no accident
that many of the older exponents of this “neoconservatism” were
themselves among the foremost critics of McCarthyism in the 1950s
and 1960s and that many of its younger exponents take the lead in
urging the repudiation of McCarthyism and other symbols of mili¬
tancy by “responsible conservatives.”

To repudiate McCarthyism, however, would be to accept not only
the establishment but also the premises and agenda on which it
operates, for the complex of public and private bureaucracies that
compose the establishment is inseparable from the environmental¬
ist, utopian, and social engineering functions that the premises and
agenda of liberalism express and rationalize. The American Right,
then, if it is serious about wanting to preserve the nation and its
social fabric and political culture in any recognizable form, must
continue to embrace Joe McCarthy and the kind of militant, popu¬
lar, anti-liberal, and antiestablishment movement that he was the
first to express on a national scale.

There is, of course, such a thing as “liberal anticommunism,” and
there is no doubt that liberals such as Sidney Hook, John P. Roche,
and the late Senator Thomas Dodd, among others, have long been
uncompromising enemies of communism within and without the
United States. In recent years, anticommunist liberals of the Ken-
nedy-Johnson era have played an important role in trying to reshape
right-wing anticommunism into molds more acceptable to the es¬
tablishment. Anticommunist adherents of liberalism may bring a
more cautious and skeptical assessment to their own ideological
premises than is common with most of their colleagues and thus
refuse to be swallowed up by the enthusiasm such premises more
often generate. As a general rule, however, anticommunist liberals
tend to reflect these premises in their opposition to communism. To
them, communism is not, as Lenin always claimed it was, the result

150

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of an organized, highly disciplined, and ruthless apparatus, but is
itself another deformation of the social and economic environment,
like crime and war, a product of ignorance, poverty, oppression,
and neglect. Hence, their idea of the proper means of fighting com¬
munism is not the use of force to suppress its apparatus but more
reform, the removal of its “causes,” with more foreign aid, more
education, more development, and, most recently, more democ¬
racy — all of which “solutions” ignore the main cause of commu¬
nism but accrue to the advantage of the educators, economists, social
engineers, political technicians, and professional verbalists who un¬
dertake to administer the solution. “The seeds of totalitarian regimes,”
said Harry Truman in announcing his doctrine in 1947, “are nur¬
tured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of
poverty and strife,” and it was “primarily through economic and
financial aid” that Truman proposed that the United States resist the
expansion of communism. From Truman’s day through Lyndon
Johnson’s “TVA on the Mekong” to the present efforts of aging social
democrats and neoconservatives in the Reagan Administration to
fight communism by undermining our best anticommunist allies —
in the Philippines, South Africa, Chile — for the sake of “human
rights” and “democracy projects,” the incompetence of liberal anti¬
communism to defeat communism is clear. No one who seriously
subscribes to the premises of liberalism can for long countenance
the thought that the only way to deal with communism is through
the timely and efficient use of force, nor can he support the idea
that those who share the premises of communist doctrine constitute
an alien and hostile presence that cannot be tolerated in a society
determined to survive.

Anticommunist liberalism does not, then, contradict the McCar¬
thyite perception of an inherent softness toward communism deriv¬
ing from liberal premises. These premises manifest themselves even
when those who share them are sincerely anticommunist, and they
serve to undermine the effectiveness of their anticommunist mea¬
sures. Yet, despite the existence of liberal opposition to commu¬
nism, anticommunism has never been a dominant strain in the ide¬
ology of the liberal elite that emerged in the early part of the century.
Anticommunist sensibilities were not prevalent in McCarthy’s day,
when the elite in both political parties did everything it could to

The Evil That Men Don 7 Do

151

resist, weaken, obstruct, and distract serious anticommunist efforts
and was itself the source of the appeasements and retreats that we
have long since consigned to oblivion.

And it is not the dominant strain in liberalism today. Private ef¬
forts by journalists and investigators have shown in recent years how
campaigns such as the antinuclear movement, much of the opposi¬
tion to American policy in Central America, the movement to weaken
the CIA and FBI, and opposition to virtually every new weapons
system proposed by the Defense Department have been led by per¬
sons and groups whose attitude toward communism and the Soviet
Union is at best equivocal and who often show no hesitation at work¬
ing with Soviet-controlled front groups and known Communists.
Such campaigns are neither largely composed of nor led by card-
carrying Communists, nor do they enjoy success because of com¬
munist assistance. On the contrary, their following and leadership
consist precisely of persons who regard themselves as liberals or
roughly equivalent persuasions, and they enjoy success because they
are generally well funded by establishment foundations, well re¬
ceived by establishment media and political figures, and well orga¬
nized and packaged by establishment intellectuals and verbalists.
When such movements and their leaders and followers worry as
much about Soviet military programs as they do about those of the
United States and NATO, when they denounce “human rights vio¬
lations” in Cuba and Angola with as much fervor as they do in El
Salvador and South Africa, when they protest the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan as strongly as they do the U.S. liberation of Grenada,
and when they speak with as much hatred and fear of the KGB as of
the FBI and CIA, then I shall regard them as the “humanists,” “paci¬
fists,” and “civil libertarians” that they profess to be. Until that
time — and I do not hold my breath — I shall believe that Joe McCar¬
thy tore a mask from the face of liberalism, and I shall regard the
mainstream of its adherents under another label, which, even if not
printed on a membership card, is more truthful and more terrible.

The Cult of Dr. King

The third annual observance of the birthday of Martin Luther
King, Jr., passed happily enough in the nation’s capital, with the
local merchants unloading their assorted junk into the hands of an
eager public. It is hardly surprising that “King Day,” observed as a
federal legal public holiday since 1986, has already become part of
the cycle of mass indulgence through which the national economy
annually revolves. Christmas itself, commemorating an event almost
as important as the nativity of Dr. King, has long been notorious for
its materialism and appetitive excesses, and a visit to any shopping
mall will alert the consumer to the next festal occasion on the public
calendar and instruct him in what ways and to what extent he is
expected to turn out his pockets in its celebration. Since Dr. King,
wherever he is now, has been promoted to full fellowship in the
national pantheon, it is to be expected that he too must perform his
office in keeping the wheels of American commerce well greased.

What is remarkable about the King holiday, however, is that, alone
among the ten national holidays created by act of Congress, it is
celebrated in other ways that are pretty much in keeping with its
original purpose. While the other nine festivities are merely excuses
for protracted buying and selling, three-day weekends with an at¬
tractive compadre, or orgies of eat-and-swill punctuated by football
games, only the second Monday in January is the regular subject of
solemn expatiations by the brahmins of the Republic as to what the
day really means. Newspaper columnists, television commentators,
and public school teachers, the nearest things we have to a priest¬
hood, devote at least a week to discussing Dr. King’s life and achieve¬
ments and their place in our national consciousness. Certainly they
do not explore the lives of Jesus, George Washington, or Christopher
Columbus with such piety, nor do they usually dedicate much time
to reflecting on the less anthropomorphized occasions that cele¬
brate national independence, public thanksgiving, or remembrance
of Americans fallen in war for the fatherland. Only Dr. King seems
to elicit effusions from the guardians of the public tongue, and, as in

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The Cult of Dr. King

153

the rituals of the heathen gods of eld, woe to the blasphemous wretch
who fails to bend the knee or touch the brow.

The fate of Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder is a case in point, though
not unique. Approached at table in Duke Zeibert’s restaurant in Wash¬
ington on the Friday before the official ceremonies, Mr. Snyder, a
sports commentator created and employed by CBS, was asked by a
local reporter for his views on the progress of blacks in professional
athletics. Mr. Snyder perhaps had dined too well, and he was foolish
enough to say what he really thought in response to the uninvited
question. He praised the accomplishments and hard work of black
athletes, made some insulting remarks about the laziness of white
athletes, and suggested that the alleged athletic prowess of blacks
was due to their having been bred for size and strength in ante¬
bellum days, specifically for their “big thighs, . . . they can jump
higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs.” It is not known
if the Greek, a professional gambler, gave odds on how long he would
keep his $750,000-a-year job after uttering his insights, but there
was little time to place any bets, and probably few would have taken
them. Within twenty-four hours Mr. Snyder was in the ranks of the
unemployed, and the incident provided fodder for the capital’s pro¬
fessional gumbeaters for the next week.

Mr. Snyder was not the first offering to the new deity, and the
practice of ruining a white person once a year in honor of Dr. King is
becoming a national tradition. Last year the victim was another sports
figure, Los Angeles Dodgers official A1 Campanis, who was asked on
ABC-TV’s “Nightline” about black athletic performance and wound
up discoursing on the comparative buoyancy of the races when im¬
mersed in water. He too got his clock cleaned by his employers, and
though the incident did not occur in connection with Dr. King’s
birthday, it did happen to fall during the week of the nineteenth
anniversary of the civil rights leader’s assassination in April 1968.

In 1986, when King Day was first celebrated after its enactment
by Congress in 1983, the god was more merciful. In Montgomery
County, Maryland, Mrs. Karen Collins, a part-time music teacher in
a Silver Spring elementary school, made the mistake of giving her
private opinion to a colleague that the country was making too
much of Dr. King and that she had heard he had been a communist
supporter and had communist friends. Her remarks were overheard

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by some students, who ran home to tell their parents, who alerted
the local XAACP to the presence of un-American activities. Even
before the XAACP invited itself to settle the matter, however, Mrs.
Collins had received a reprimand from her principal, had been placed
on administrative leave, transferred to another school, and required
to enroll in a “human relations” course where she could learn some¬
thing about the American Way before she trampled on it again by
spouting off her opinions in private.

The XAACP was not at all satisfied with such lax discipline and
demanded her dismissal. ‘Any person who says Dr. King was a com¬
munist is either maliciously racist or uninformed,” said Roscoe Xix,
president of the local chapter. Actually, it was never certain exactly
what Mrs. Collins had said. She denied saying that King was a Com¬
munist, and after her disciplining, school superintendent Wilmer S.
Cody acknowledged that ‘‘although her exact words are still in dis¬
pute, she did express some dissatisfaction about the school system’s
special program concerning Martin Luther King’s birthday.” Des¬
pite her crime of offering her views of the special program, Mrs.
Collins appears to have kept her job. but the god whom she blas¬
phemed had tasted blood.

If the reader thinks I exaggerate the metaphor of King as god.
consider the demand in 1979 (and since) to add Dr. King’s “Letter
from the Birmingham Jail'* to the Bible. At the third annual con¬
ference of the Black Theology Project in 1 9^9, a proposal to add the
letter as another epistle in the Xew Testament was approved by the
convention of about forty black ministers, theologians, and lay peo¬
ple. and the Reverend Muhammed Kenyatta. instructor in sociology
at Haverford College, held that “we believe God worked through Dr.
Martin Luther King in that jail in Birmingham in 1963 to reveal His
holy word." The pious sociologist also noted that "people generally
do not realize that the process of deciding what is or is not Holy
Scripture has been an ongoing one.”

If the thirst of the new god were slaked only by the ritual slaugh¬
ter of schoolteachers and sports commentators, Dr. King’s apothe¬
osis might actually represent a step forward for the country, but
evidence mounts that more is being demanded. King Day in fact
represents a revolution in our national mythology a transformation
that seeks to delegitimize the symbols of American history and na-

The Cult of Dr. King

155

tional identity and to redefine the meaning of the American Repub¬
lic — perhaps even the meaning of the Christian faith. This at least is
the explicit understanding of the holiday that the dominant molders
of public opinion articulate every year in their ceremonial rumina¬
tions. Thus, writing in the New York Times on January 18, 1988,
Vincent Harding, Professor of Religion and Social Transformation at
the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, rejected the notion that the
King holiday commemorates merely “a kind, gentle and easily man¬
aged religious leader of a friendly crusade for racial integration.”
Such an understanding, he writes, would “demean and trivialize Dr.
Kings meaning,” and the higher truth of King Day is made of sterner
stuff. “The Martin Luther King of 1968,” writes Mr. Harding,

was calling for and leading civil disobedience campaigns against the unjust
war in Vietnam. Courageously describing our nation as “the greatest pur¬
veyor of violence in the world today,” he was urging us away from a depen¬
dence on military solutions. He was encouraging young men to refuse to
serve in the military, challenging them not to support America’s anti-Com-
munist crusades, which were really destroying the hopes of poor nonwhite
peoples everywhere.

This Martin Luther King was calling for a radical redistribution of wealth
and political power in American society as a way to provide food, clothing,
shelter, medical care, jobs, education and hope for all of our country ’s people.

Roger Wilkins, civil rights activist and now a senior fellow at the far-
Left Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, had some similar
thoughts about the meaning of Dr. King’s legacy in the Washington
Post , and indeed similar interpretations of the man and the holiday
could be reproduced from the major media of public opinion for
every year since the holiday was created.

To be sure, the use of the King holiday to legitimize the Left’s long
march through American institutions is not the only meaning attrib¬
uted to it. At the time of its enactment by Congress, various ration¬
ales were offered by liberals and conservatives alike: that the holiday
was merely a celebration of the personal virtues of a man of courage
and vision, that it honored the national rejection of racial bigotry, or
that it was a holiday for American blacks, who, it was patronizingly
said, “needed their own hero,” much as children in a restaurant
need their own menu. Yet these are not the presiding apologiae for
the holiday, nor were they at the time it was adopted; and the radical

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interpretation of Dr. King and his legacy is both the dominant as
well as the more accurate version.

The objective meaning of the King holiday — the actual meaning
independent of what its sponsors thought they meant or what some
of its celebrants think they mean now — has little to do with the
renunciation of cross-burnings and lynch parties or even of less ma¬
levolent incarnations of Jim Crow such as segregated lunch coun¬
ters. To be sure, a nation that honors Dr. King and his legacy renounces
such manifestations of racial inequality, but it also must renounce all
forms of inequality, racial or other, because if all men are indeed
equal, then it is absurd to say that only some forms of inequality are
evil. If, as Dr. King understood it, the Declaration of Independence
is a “promissory note” — not merely declarative of national indepen¬
dence but also imperative of social reconstruction in accordance
with an egalitarian commandment — then the delegitimization of
the traditional symbols, values, and institutions of America is not
only in order but also long overdue, and the radical reconstruction
of American society is not only a legitimate goal but also the prin¬
cipal legitimate goal of our national endeavors.

Dr. King understood this well himself, expressing it in the mille-
narian imagery he loved and used so effectively — “I have a dream
that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain
shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plains, and the
crooked places shall be made straight, and the glory of the Lord
shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” Dr. King, of
course, seldom troubled to ask for the sources of his dream, and
today it occurs to no one to ask why his dreams should prevail over
the less grandiose dreams of others. Like all charismatic prophets,
he was the fount of his own authority, and his private visions were
intended to become law for lesser men.

Among the several hills and mountains that await lowering by the
new god and his gnostic bulldozers is the tradition, common among
white southerners, of displaying the Confederate flag in places of
honor. Some southern states, Alabama and South Carolina in partic¬
ular, still fly the banner over their state capitols, while the official
flags of several other southern states retain its St. Andrew’s Cross
design in one way or another. The NAACF has recently decided that
the flag must go and has given the project priority in its current

The Cult of Dr. King

157

legislative agenda, and innumerable southern schools already have
been obliged to give up using the flag as the symbol of their local
football teams, along with playing “Dixie,” calling the team “The
Rebels,” and other traditional usages distinctive of southern cultural
identity.

In Alabama, State Representative Thomas Reed threatened to tear
down the flag over the statehouse if it were not removed. It wasn’t,
and Governor Guy Hunt had the local head of the NAACF arrested
when he clambered over the fence with his merry band of icon-
smashers. Alabama Representative Alvin Holmes readily compares
the Confederacy to Nazi Germany and instructs the people of his
state, “They need to forget about the Confederacy.” Earl Shinhoster,
head of the southeastern division of the NAACP, says of the flags,
“They’re racist symbols. . . . These flags stand for racism, divisive¬
ness and oppression,” and also for “defiance and resistance to school
desegregation.”

Columnist Carl Rowan, who seldom declines to dance to the
NAACP’s tune, compares the flag to the Nazi swastika and writes,
“Show me a guy who rides around with Confederate flags flying on
his front fenders, and I’ll show you someone who thinks the Civil
War still goes on. I’ll give you a racist who thinks that it is only a
matter of time before this nation makes white supremacy its official
policy and returns to slavery, with black people the God-designated
hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Mr. Rowan apparently has
never had a dream of a day when men would not be judged by the
color of their front fenders.

But the fact that many southerners (and some non-southerners)
regard the Confederate flag as a symbol of things other than rac¬
ism — southern cultural identity, sacrifice for a cause, an interpreta¬
tion of the Constitution, or simply ancestral piety — does not really
help. Mr. Shinhoster, Mr. Rowan, Mr. Reed, and Mr. Holmes all are
correct that the Confederate flag symbolizes a cause that was de¬
feated in 1865 and which is not compatible with the world-view
symbolized by Dr. King’s holiday. If, as a nation, we are going to
adore Dr. King as an official hero, then we cannot also continue to
honor the Confederate flag and the political and cultural identity
that is the main content of its symbolism.

It is merely a matter of time before the Confederate flag is surren-

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dered, along with local statues of Confederate veterans and heroes,
“Dixie,” and most other memorials of antebellum civilization. Their
passing may not be a cause of mourning among many outside the
South (or many within the South, for that matter), but the same logic
that compels their abandonment reaches further. The three most
prominent monuments in Washington, D.C., are those dedicated to
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Is
there a schoolchild in the United States today who does not know
that the first two were slaveowners? Is there any literate person in
America who does not know that none of the three was a racial
egalitarian, that every one of them uttered statements that make
Jimmy the Greek sound like an ACLU lawyer? The same argument
that drives Mr. Snyder from his low but honest trade and pulls down
a banner commemorating the last stand of a desperate people will
demolish the obelisk and temples that memorialize the major states¬
men of the American nation.

Nor is it merely the physical symbols of the old America that are
shattered by the new god we have chosen to worship. In May 1987,
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall proclaimed in a public
speech that he could not “find the wisdom, foresight and sense of
justice exhibited by the framers” of the U.S. Constitution “particu¬
larly profound.” Because they did not bow to the egalitarian and
universalist idols in the shrines where Justice Marshall has worshipped
all his life and because they failed to include blacks and women in
the Constitution, the document they drafted was “defective from
the start.” No doubt it is astonishing that an associate justice of the
Supreme Court could say that the fundamental law of the country,
which it is his business and his duty to interpret, is inherently flawed,
but the justice merely forces us up another rung on the ladder. We
forfeited the right to revere the Constitution, the governmental
principles and mechanisms it established, and the men who wrote it
when we put Dr. King into the pantheon. The federalism, rule of
law, states’ rights, limits on majority rule, checks and balances, and
separation of powers that characterize the Constitution all are in¬
compatible with and constraints on the full blossoming of the egali¬
tarian democracy that Dr. King envisioned and which is the comple¬
tion of the radical reconstruction to which his holiday commits us.

Political symbols in the form of the Confederate flag, anthems

The Cult of Dr. King

159

such as “Dixie” and “Maryland, My Maryland,” and the Constitu¬
tion itself are not the only roots to be pulled up, however. Last year,
the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a protest march at Stanford Univer¬
sity in one of the more explicit demonstrations against the human¬
ities curriculum of the school, giving the chant, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho,
Western culture’s got to go.” This year the faculty senate of the uni¬
versity considered a proposal to abandon a required course on “West¬
ern Culture” and to replace it with one entitled “Cultures, Ideas and
Values.” The latter contained no core list of assigned readings, and
the only requirement was that professors include in their assign¬
ments “works by women, minorities, and persons of color” and
emphasize “the last six to eight centuries in particular.” One alter¬
native course, developed by Professor Clayborne Carson, director
of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project, required such texts as
Black Elk Speaks, “Ain’t I a Woman,” W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of
Black Folk, Frantz Fanon, and those long-neglected Third World
persons of color, Herbert Marcuse and Karl Marx. Whatever merits
such writers might have over the ancient, medieval, and modern
classics of the West, it should be clear that the alternative curricu¬
lum was intended as part of the radical reconstruction of the Ameri¬
can mind and the extirpation of the philosophical roots of Western
predominance. The demand for the change at Stanford, according
to news reports, was led by black, Hispanic, and Asian students,
who denounced the traditional curriculum as a “year-long class in
racism.”

The point, of course, is not that the establishment of the King
holiday makes the extirpation of the traditional symbols of Ameri¬
can and Western civilization inevitable — anti-American and anti-
Western movements founded on militant egalitarian universalism
are powerful forces and would make gains regardless of the holi¬
day — but that, once the United States, through its national govern¬
ment, chose to adopt Dr. King as an official hero, neither the Ameri¬
can people nor their leaders had any legitimate grounds to resist the
logic and dynamic of such forces and the radical reconstruction of
American society that is implicit in them. It is one thing to say that
Dr. King was a great man and a great American, a man whose per¬
sonal courage and vision, despite his human flaws, errors, and en¬
thusiasms, challenged lesser men of both races and forced them to

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confront evils, falsehoods, and obsolete ways. It is quite another to
say, as the U.S. government does say in creating a legal public holi¬
day for him, that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the most important
American who ever lived, at least the peer of George Washington,
the Father of his Country, the only American in history to have his
birthday made a national holiday, the man who is now first in the
hearts of his countrymen. Conservatives, some of whom, like Repre¬
sentatives Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich, voted for the King holiday
in 1983, may devise whatever clever rationales for supporting it
they can imagine, but the truth is that Mr. Harding’s understanding
of the meaning of Kings career is far closer to the truth. In any case,
aside from obligatory genuflections to King by neoconservatives,
“cultural conservatives,” and the adherents of Mr. Gingrich’s “Con¬
servative Opportunity Society,” I know of not a single serious, sus¬
tained effort by those on the contemporary American Right to sub¬
stantiate their endorsement of the holiday or of any serious argument
why conservatives should honor Dr. King at all. If there are valid
reasons why we should do so, we do not hear them. What we do
hear are sermons from apostles such as Mr. Harding and company,
most of whom can press a far more persuasive claim to King’s legacy
than conservatives of any description.

That legacy, as its keepers know, is profoundly at odds with the
historic American order, and that is why they can have no rest until
the symbols of that order are pulled up root and branch. To say that
Dr. King and the cause he really represented are now part of the
official American creed, indeed the defining and dominant symbol
of that creed — which is what both houses of the United States Con¬
gress said in 1983 and what President Ronald Reagan signed into
law shortly afterwards — is the inauguration of a new order of the
ages in which the symbols of the old order and the things they
symbolized can retain neither meaning nor respect, in which they
are as mute and dark as the gods of Babylon and Tyre, and from
whose cold ashes will rise a new god. leveling their rough places,
straightening their crookedness, and exalting every valley until the
whole earth is flattened beneath his feet and perceives the glory of
the new lord.

Who’s In Charge Here?

America, in case you haven’t noticed, is lost in the throes of cele¬
brating the writing of its Constitution, which is two centuries old
this year. The somewhat labored efforts to fix public attention on
the historic document are largely the work of former Chief Justice
Warren Burger and his own private bureaucracy in the Commission
on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the legal
profession, the mass media, and the usual contingent of do-gooding
schoolteachers, who have temporarily suspended their instruction
in the intricacies of sexuality and collective guilt over what we did
to Indians, blacks, women, and buffaloes and are now passionately
handing out trivia quizzes on the color of James Madison’s socks.

But the national rapture over our fundamental law does not match
the fevers manufactured a few years ago when we observed the cen¬
tennials of the War between the States and the American War for
Independence. War, wrote Thomas Hardy, makes ripping good his¬
tory, but it also makes for historic rip-offs every hundred years or
so, when we pine for the return of bloodshed fraught with moral
import. Somehow the sober deliberations of the Framers in the Phil¬
adelphia Convention just don’t stir the glands like Gettysburg and
Bunker Hill, and the attempts of public officials to instruct us in the
minutiae of the Framers’ debates come off rather like the efforts of
earnest mothers who insist on reading their children old-fashioned
fairy tales when the urchins would much prefer the Saturday morn¬
ing cartoons.

Among the year’s festivities have been some rather glum proceed¬
ings in the U.S. Congress having to do with the Constitution and its
proper interpretation. The recently concluded necktie party that
passed as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Judge Robert
Bork dealt tangentially with this matter, but more expansively on
the character and personality of the jurist who was unwise enough
to allow his name to come under the purview of the committee.
Although it did not appear in the hearing record, information re¬
vealed by one of the lesser lights of Washington journalism, the City

161

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Paper, helped set the tone of the inquiry. Its reporters managed to
procure a list of video films that Judge Bork had rented and pro¬
ceeded to regale their readers with the titles. They seemed to be
mainly Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1940s, and some disappoint¬
ment was expressed that the nominee was not a fan of “Story of O”
or “Ilse, She- Wolf of the S.S.” The District of Columbia City Council
quickly developed legislation to forbid video stores from releasing
information on the films their patrons rent and, given the probable
tastes of Mayor Marion Barry and the several members of his admin¬
istration who have been jailed for corruption since he entered office,
the legislation was probably wise.

The other main celebration of the Constitution by the Congress
was the now largely forgotten Iran-Contra hearings, which raised to
stardom Oliver North, Daniel Inouye, Fawn Hall, and other lumi¬
naries who today seem as distant as Halley’s Comet, and which
immersed itself in the metaphysics of something known as the Bo¬
land Amendments and the mystery of why Colonel North purchased
his snow tires. The distinguished chairman of the joint committee,
hailing from sun-drenched Hawaii, could not hav e been expected to
understand the purpose of such paraphernalia, though one would
have thought that liv ing in the vicinity of Washington for some
twenty-eight years would have served to inform him. My own guess
as to the motives of the combat officer-turned-bagman — sadly dis¬
proved by subsequent events — was that he planned to necklace two
members of the committee w hen he finally appeared before it.

Yet for all its irrelev ance, the joint committee did broach a subject
of some significance for the Republic. The attentive citizen could
discern, wrell disguised by the protracted caterwauling emitted by
the senators, congressmen, and their flying squadrons of counsels
and investigators, the kernel of a constitutional crisis centering on
the problem of who — the president or the Congress — is properly in
charge of American foreign policy. The debate w^as duly joined in
the national media, and if the hearings themselves w^ere not very
helpful in answering the question, a good deal w^as learned from
those writers w ho offered their owm view^s to public scrutiny.

In general, the ideological breakdow n of those wrho expressed
themselves on w hether the Congress or the president should have
authority over a foreign policy that seems to consist of the system-

Who 's In Charge Here ?

163

atic violation or evasion of treaty commitments, the incremental
massacre and abduction of U.S. citizens and soldiers, the abandon¬
ment of allies, the gradual surrender of power and territory, and the
Higher Bribery known as foreign aid was that conservatives almost
universally supported the claims of the presidency, while liberals
equally unanimously upheld the rights of Congress. Defenders of
Mr. Reagan and his Central American policies held that the Boland
Amendments, which sought to restrict or curtail U.S. funding of the
Nicaraguan anticommunist guerrillas, were unconstitutional inva¬
sions by the Congress of what they made out was a unilateral presi¬
dential prerogative of designing and implementing foreign policy.
Liberals, on the other hand, firmly upheld the legality and propriety
of the amendments as well as of other congressional measures, such
as the War Powers Act of 1973, that constrain the ability of the
president to carry out a policy without congressional permission.
The most articulate of the progressive set murmured darkly about
“another Vietnam” and drew grim pictures of a White House, Na¬
tional Security Council, and CIA once more out of control, stam¬
peding about the world in intrigues with ayatollahs, shady arms
merchants, professional assassins, and miscellaneous desperadoes
of the international demimonde.

Given the partisan complexion of the Iran-Contra controversy,
this breakdown was not surprising. Conservatives understandably
defended the propriety of Mr. Reagan or his lieutenants seeking to
preserve a semblance of freedom in Central America from a Con¬
gress that refuses to recognize the nature of a “people’s democracy ”
guided by commissars imported from Havana and Moscow, while
liberals, whatever ideals remain in their jaded hearts, understand¬
ably sought to weaken their most powerful and popular foe to oc¬
cupy the White House in this century.

What is perhaps more surprising about this breakdown is that it
represents a complete reversal of the positions assumed by liberals
and conservatives on the issue of congressional-presidential powers
in foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s. When, in September 1983,
the U.S. Senate debated the War Powers Act and its applicability to
Mr. Reagan’s deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon, Senator Barry
Goldwater, defending the president’s power to dispatch troops with¬
out congressional permission, was reduced to the ignominy of citing

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Dean Acheson, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt as authorities
for his view that “once the military forces are established and
equipped, it is for the President alone to decide how to deploy and
use those forces.” Senator Goldwater, in the later parts of his career,
never tired of excoriating the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Senator Jesse
Helms and kindred souls among his colleagues in the Senate, and
other figures of the “New Right” for their alleged deviations from
conservative orthodoxy as defined by himself. In the principal state¬
ment of that orthodoxy in I960, however, he had lamented that
“The Achesons and Larsons have had their way. . . . Inside the fed¬
eral government both the executive and judicial branches have
roamed far outside their constitutional boundary lines,” and he had
correctly pointed out the intentions of the Framers in “dispersing
public authority among several levels and branches of government
in the hope that each seat of authority, jealous of its own preroga¬
tives, would have a natural incentive to resist aggression by the oth¬
ers.” As late as 1978, Senator Gold water’s name appeared as the
author of a learned study published by the Heritage Foundation that
argued against the legality of President Carter’s claim to the right of
abrogating the Mutual Defense Treaty with the Republic of China.

Yet it is not necessary to cite “Mr. Conservative” in his dotage to
show that the American right seems to have experienced a conver¬
sion. Walter Berns, distinguished neoconservative philosopher and
disciple of Leo Strauss, writing in the Washington Times on June 3,
1987, expressed the view that “the Framers . . . knew, what some
members of Congress today seem unwilling to admit, that much as
one might like to do everything by or by means of law, the conduct
of foreign affairs especially cannot be subjected to the rules of law.”
He defended this proposition with reference to John Locke’s pre¬
cepts on the “power to act according to discretion for the public
good, without the prescription of law and sometimes against it,”
and by citing Abraham Lincoln’s multifarious wartime violations of
law and Constitution, which show that “Somewhere in the inter¬
stices of the Constitution, apparently — the alternative is to regard
Lincoln as some sort of usurper or dictator — the president is vested
with a power that, in some circumstances, resembles or approxi¬
mates Locke’s prerogative.” Dr. Berns made much of the ruling of
Justice George Sutherland in U.S. vs. Curtiss Wright Export Corpo -

Who *s In Charge Here ?

165

ration , a New Deal-era decision that recognized in the president
the “sole organ of the federal government in the field of interna¬
tional relations” and which has become the classic Supreme Court
case on the subject of presidential power in foreign policy.

Perhaps an even more aggressive statement of the doctrine of presi¬
dential supremacy in foreign affairs was offered by Dennis Teti, a
staff member of the Iran-Contra committee itself, in the Fall 1987
issue of Policy Review. While acknowledging that “Congress has a
genuine but subordinate role to play in the formulation of foreign
policy,” Mr. Teti argued,

A close look at the Constitution shows that, while the executive branch does
not possess the entirety of foreign policy power, it has most of it. Under
Article II, “executive power” is lodged in the president. By definition the
executive power comprehends the conduct of foreign policy. The Framers
found it unnecessary to define the term, but the inclusion of foreign policy
under executive power is discussed at length in John Locke’s Two Treatises
of Government, a fundamental source for the Founders.

Aside from the utility of such views in contemporary political
disputes, however, there is little merit in them from the perspective
of traditional constitutional theory. Contrary to Mr. Teti’s assertion
of the implicit powers of the executive branch in foreign policy, the
text of the Constitution rather clearly grants to the Congress expan¬
sive powers in this area as well as in defense matters and only re¬
stricted responsibilities to the president. Article 1, section 8 states,

The Congress shall have power to . . . provide for the common defense and
general welfare of the United States ... to borrow money on the credit of the
United States ... to regulate commerce with foreign nations ... to define
and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses
against the law of nations ... to declare war, grant letters of marque and
reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water ... to raise
and support armies ... to provide and maintain a navy ... to make rules for
the government and regulation of the land and naval forces ... to provide
for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insur¬
rections and repel invasions . . . [and] to make all laws which shall be neces¬
sary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all
other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United
States, or in any department or officer thereof.

The same article also forbids to the states any powers in foreign
policy, and the next article governs the very limited foreign policy

166

Beautiful Losers

prerogatives granted to the president. These consist only of being
the commander in chief of the army and navy, the power “by and
with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, pro¬
vided two-thirds of the Senators concur,” and the power to “nomi¬
nate. and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate . . . [to]
appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls.” It may
be noted that Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 69 considered the
power of receiving ambassadors to be “more a matter of dignity
than authority” and “without consequence in the administration of
the government.” The very carefully expressed congressional limita¬
tions on the foreign policy powers of the president and the specific
authorization of extensive foreign policy powers for the Congress
suggest almost conclusively that the Framers had no intention of
permitting the executive branch to carry out a foreign policy that
contravened the wishes of the Congress or at least of the Senate, and
that they intended the Congress to take a major role in the conduct
of international relations and national defense.

The argument that Locke’s view of executive powers is in some
way germane to the meaning of the Constitution is not only without
merit but borders on absurdity. Whatever Locke may have thought
about executive power or the conduct of foreign policy, it was not.
according to constitutional historian Forrest McDonald, from his
Two Treatises of Government that the Framers derived their view
of executive power, but from Sir W illiam Blackstone. “Experience,”
writes McDonald, “was not an adequate guide, for their experience
with colonial and state governors was largely irrelevant to the task
presently at hand. Hume was silent on the subject, Montesquieu
muddled. Locke too general. That left Blackstone’s description of
the royal prerogative as the only readily available account of what
had traditionally been regarded as the executive power in a mixed
form of government.” The English jurist did indeed acknowledge
that the executive power, lodged under the British constitution in
the crown, included the conduct of foreign relations and of war,
including the right to declare war and make treaties without parlia¬
mentary consent. Obviously, the Framers did not provide the Amer¬
ican presidency with such powers, nor with the absolute veto of the
British king, which also belonged to the executive power in Black-
stone’s view.

167

Who 's In Charge Here ?

Dr. Berns’s belief that “the conduct of foreign affairs especially
cannot be subjected to the rules of law” has merit, though it is not a
constitutional argument and might give pause to other nations con¬
templating making treaties with the United States. Conservatives
also might pause to consider the implications of foreign policy powers,
lodged exclusively in the chief executive and exempt from the con¬
straint of law, as they would be exercised by a President Jesse Jack-
son or Michael Dukakis. Nevertheless, the question does not really
concern the application of legalism to foreign policy but rather the
determination of which branch of government is legally responsible
for the conduct of foreign relations. To deal with Nicaragua or Can¬
ada as though either were bound by the rights and obligations of U.S.
law is indeed an absurdity, but to determine who in the U.S. govern¬
ment is ultimately responsible for defining U.S. policy toward Nic¬
aragua and Canada is an essential question that must be settled by
law in a state pretending to the title of a constitutional republic.

Nor is the appeal to Justice Sutherland’s opinion in U.S. vs. Cur¬
tiss Wright Export Corporation a sound basis for the doctrine of
executive supremacy. Raoul Berger, after a three-page scrutiny of
the decision in his Executive Privilege , considers that “the mis¬
chievous and demonstrably wrong dicta of Justice Sutherland de¬
serve no further credence,” though he devotes another six pages to
its pulverization. The late Alexander Bickel similarly held that Jus¬
tice Sutherland’s “grandiose conception never had any warrant in
the Constitution, is wrong in theory and unworkable in practice.”

Conservatives today may perhaps be excused for allowing their
commitment to Mr. Reagan and his support for anticommunist
forces in Central America to get the better of their constitutional
judgment, but their abandonment of a strong, legitimate congres¬
sional role in foreign policy is of more than antiquarian interest.
Conservative reversal on this issue in fact represents a major redefi¬
nition of the terms of public discourse in American political culture.

Historian George H. Nash noted, in the 1950s and 1960s, “the
growing conservative tendency to rely on the one branch of govern¬
ment which had proved immune to radical assault: the Congress.”
Conservative political leaders like Robert Taft, Richard Nixon,
Joseph McCarthy, and John W. Bricker all insisted that Congress had
a right and a duty to contribute to, investigate, and oversee presi-

168

Beautiful Losers

dential conduct of foreign policy, and their practice found theoreti¬
cal justification in the writings of Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall,
James Burnham, and Russell Kirk, among others.

Aside from the constitutional merits of the position, the reason for
the conservative defense of Congress lay, as Nash suggests, in the fact
that the locally based Congress was in large part “immune” to the
political influence of the forces that dominated the executive branch.
The latter, increasingly controlled by a new managerial elite that used
New Deal liberalism and progressivism as its ideological formula,
sought to implement a globalist foreign policy that would complete
the interdependence and integration of the United States in a trans¬
national world order in which American national sovereignty and
cultural distinctiveness would evaporate. The United Nations, large
regional security pacts, international financial and legal institutions,
and multilateral treaty regimes on matters ranging from genocide to
the law of the sea to arms control provided the framework for this
new global order, in which a technically skilled and cosmopolitan-
minded elite would displace traditional, local, and national elites.

The transformation of conservative opinion from support for a
congressional role in foreign policy to virtually unanimous endorse¬
ment of presidential supremacy or even monopoly in foreign affairs
thus represents more than a partisan eagerness to defend Mr. Rea¬
gan’s White House or resist communist power in Central America.
The very ability of conservatives to win and hold the presidency for
eight years indicates less their successful challenge to the estab¬
lished elite and its domestic and foreign agenda than their assimila¬
tion by the elite itself. Conservative willingness to use the rhetoric
and ideas of progressivism in foreign policy — “human rights,” the
sponsorship of global democracy, defense of an “international
economy” — matches the recent conservative reliance on the execu¬
tive branch in international relations and helps to reconcile the new
conservative program in foreign affairs to the interests and ideology
of the dominant elite. Contemporary conservatism offers little seri¬
ous resistance to further absorption of American sovereignty and
civilizational integrity into what neoconservative Zbigniew Brze-
zinski calls the “technetronic age,” and the number of conservatives
who today defend classically nationalist policies such as protec¬
tionism and restrictions on immigration is microscopic.

169

Who ’s In Charge Here ?

Present-day conservative anticommunism increasingly resembles
the ineffectual containment strategy of the elite of the 1950s and
1960s and is largely predicated on humanitarian and moral con¬
cerns over the lack of civil and political liberties in communist
states rather than on an understanding of the strategic dangers to
American national interests of a world-revolutionary ideology. In¬
stead of calling openly for the overthrow of the Sandinistas and
other communist gangs, it gingerly demands “free elections” and
negotiated settlements, and the recent movement of Mr. Reagan’s
foreign policy toward acceptance of the Marxist state in Mozam¬
bique, the appointment of Armand Hammer’s protege C. William
Verity as secretary of commerce, and the quest for arms control
treaties with the Soviets are merely the logical extrapolations of the
recent tendency of the American Right to accommodate itself to the
goals of the incumbent elite. Exactly how the Right has been sub¬
sumed by its one-time rivals for political and social dominance is a
complicated story, but what is now regarded as “mainstream con¬
servatism” has been so enervated in its willingness to offer resis¬
tance to the dominant elite and its basic ideology and policies that
the fact of its assimilation cannot be doubted.

The bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution deserves a bit more in
the way of celebration than firecrackers, docudramas, and the ba¬
nalities from Right and Left of the Iran-Contra hearings. What came
out of the Great Convention two hundred years ago remains the
principal political symbol of a unique and ancient civilization that
managerial globalism and social engineering are trying to subvert,
and it is doubtful that reliance on the instruments that our tech¬
nocratic brahmins have devised can preserve either the Constitution
or the cultural fabric that underlies it. If the new generation of con¬
servatives is serious about wanting to defend either its civilizational
inheritance or the political and legal mechanisms by which its civi¬
lization has been governed, it might begin by resisting the tempta¬
tions of partisan convenience and the baubles of power and reputa¬
tion that its enemies have dangled before it and try to reclaim a way
of life and a method of ruling and being ruled that its predecessors
once understood.

Imperial Conservatives?

American conservatives have come a long way since Ohio’s Sen¬
ator John Bricker introduced a constitutional amendment to restrict
the treaty-making power in 1952. Perhaps they’ve come too far.
Today few on the Right share Mr. Bricker ’s belief that Congress ought
to have a significant role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. Nothing
brings foam to the conservative mandible more easily than a favor¬
able allusion to the Boland Amendments or the War Powers Act, and
cries against “congressional micromanagement” and “535 secretaries
of state” became watchwords among Washington conservatives
under the Reagan presidency.

John Bricker certainly would never have endorsed either Boland
or War Powers — both are stupid measures, the one as harmful in its
effects on Central America as the other is frivolous and unenforce¬
able — but he surely would have argued for the validity of their basic
assumption of legislative supremacy. The idea that the legislative
branch has a vital role to play in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy
and the disposition of American troops, now anathema to most con¬
servatives, was fundamental to the principles espoused by Bricker,
Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and other spokesmen of the Right.
Taft, in the words of Russell Kirk and James McClellan, asserted “the
right and the necessity, in the American democratic republic, for
Congress to participate with the Executive in the conduct of foreign
affairs,” and “Mr. Republican” himself wrote in A Foreign Policy for
Americans: “If in the great field of foreign policy the President has
the arbitrary and unlimited powers he now claims, then there is an
end to freedom in the United States not only in the foreign field but
in the great realm of domestic activity which necessarily follows
any foreign commitments.”

In a recent issue of Policy Review , Representative Mickey Edwards
undertook to defend and articulate the Taft-Bricker view that the
U.S. Congress possesses a strong and legitimate role in foreign pol¬
icy. He did so with learning and eloquence, urging that the intent of
the Framers, more recent scholarship, and the conservative princi-

170

Imperial Conservatives ?

171

pies that “the separation of powers and the balance of powers were
the greatest protectors of our freedoms” all support his conclusion
that “foreign policy is an arena in which the powers and respon¬
sibilities of the Congress and the executive share a poorly defined
playing field, each with important roles to play.” But Mr. Edwards’s
effort, valiant as it was, has generally been greeted ferociously by
his conservative critics and colleagues.

Nevertheless, conservatives ought to pause and retrace the steps
that have brought them close to being what Mr. Edwards calls “New
Age monarchists.” Constitutional arguments aside, there are plenty
of sound, pragmatic reasons for conservatives to defend a strong
congressional role in foreign policy. Even under Mr. Reagan, conser¬
vatives in the Senate and House were v ital in resisting efforts to
circumvent the Taiwan Relations Act and adhere to the unratified
SALT II treaty, among other silly State Department ideas. The pro¬
pensity of the executive branch to commit the United States to for¬
eign involvements that the Senate has not approved and would not
condone was precisely part of what the Bricker Amendment sought
to challenge. Moreover, conservatives like New Hampshire’s Senator
Gordon Humphrey have been instrumental in pushing the admin¬
istration into more support for the Afghan resistance. Moderate Dem¬
ocrats like Arizona’s Dennis DeConcini have played similar roles
with policies toward Angola and UNITA. Senators Steve Symms,
Orrin Hatch, and the late John East, and former Senator Jeremiah
Denton all at one time or another (and Senator Jesse Helms in some
respects almost continuously) have opposed executive-branch pol¬
icies and actions on arms control, trade with the Soviet Bloc, for¬
eign aid, treaties, appointments and nominations, and diplomacy in
Latin America, Southern Africa, and the Far East. If such congres¬
sional activities aren’t “micromanagement,” the term has little mean¬
ing. Long before Boland, the main symbol of “congressional micro-
management” was the Jackson- Vanik amendment of 1974, which
forbids granting most-favored-nation status to communist states
that restrict emigration, and it too won virtually unanimous sup¬
port from congressional conservatives.

Most conservatives, even while denouncing micromanagement,
have defended all these instances of it. Their view of who should
run U.S. foreign policy seems to be approaching incoherence, and

172

Beautiful Losers

as Mr. Edwards warns, “Conservatives need to remember that the
powers we would give to a Ronald Reagan or a George Bush will
someday he used by a Walter Mondale or a Michael Dukakis.” As
recent history shows, however, these powers are already being used
hv a foreign policy bureaucracy uncontrolled by elections and often
independent of Congress and president alike.

Its easy for conservatives today to defend virtually exclusive presi¬
dential powers in foreign affairs by pointing to the rightward-lean¬
ing Reagan and Bush administrations and by citing not only left-
wing congressional partisanism in foreign policy but also clear
instances of legislative irresponsibility: security leaks, junketeering
that compromises official U.S. policy, and general dithering, ap¬
peasement, and catering to special interests. But the conservative
shift in perspective on the Congress and the presidency transcends
current policy disputes and partisan bickering. It implies, logically
and eventually in practice, a decisive erosion of some of the funda¬
mental premises of conservative thought on which a good many
other conservative positions depend.

No conservative theorist has articulated these premises and their
connection with congressional authority more clearly than the late
James Burnham in his 1959 Congress and the American Tradition.
Long before Arthur Schlesinger discovered the “imperial presidency”
(after serving and salivating over it for most of his life), Burnham, as
William F. Buckley wrote in 1973, carefully charted “the usurpa¬
tions of power by the Executive over a generation, done needless to
say to the elated applause of liberal intellectuals.”

Congress and the American Tradition is a work that must be
read on two levels. On one level, it is an exposition of the historical
and theoretical role of the Congress in the design of the American
Republic and of the eventual capture of that role by the executive
branch. On another level, however, the book is a study of why the
survival of congressional authority is essential for the survival of
political freedom.

Burnham saw the rise of the presidency as an integral part of the
world-historical transformation that in 1940 he labeled “the mana¬
gerial revolution,” the displacement by massive, bureaucratically
controlled organizations, often transnational in scope, of small-scale

Imperial Conservatives?

173

entrepreneurial, private capitalism; locally based, constitutionalist,
parliamentary government; and the independent and sovereign
nation-state. A new elite, the managerial class, was emerging into
economic, political, and cultural dominance, in the United States
using the liberal formulas of the New Deal to delegitimize the old
elite and its institutions and legitimize its own power. The supposed
need for centralized social and economic management, lodged in
the federal bureaucracy and circumventing local and congressional
resistance through direct appeals to the mass electorate, was the
main rationale that the new class and its intellectual apologists artic¬
ulated. “These tendencies,” wrote Burnham, “ — democratism plebi¬
scitary, bureaucratic, centralist, Caesarean — are the political phase
of the general historical transformation of our era that in 1940 I
named ‘the managerial revolution.’ ”

The threat represented by this “political phase” was the curtail¬
ment of the social basis of political freedom in intermediary institu¬
tions, through which the deliberate and refracted will of the national
community is expressed and in the conflict and opposition of which
freedom resides. “Within the United States today,” wrote Burnham,
“Congress is in existing fact the prime intermediary institution, the
chief political organ of the people as distinguished from the masses,
the one body to which the citizenry can now appeal for redress not
merely from individual despotic acts . . . but from large-scale des¬
potic innovations, trends and principles.”

Although Burnham himself was a strong advocate of a vigorous
international role for the United States, he saw the erosion of the
treaty-making and war powers of Congress and their effectiv e trans¬
fer to the presidency (in reality, to the executive branch bureaucracy
that is part of or sibling to the managerial class) as a threat to both
freedom and national sovereignty. Presidents, untrammeled by con¬
gressional restraints in foreign affairs, could make executive agree¬
ments and treaties that substantially changed U.S. and state laws.
They could commit American troops to foreign conflicts without
adequate national consensus or even pro forma congressional con¬
sent and (as Truman tried to do in seizing the steel mills) threaten
individual liberties by invoking “national emergency.” The tendency
of the managerial revolution to consolidate independent national

174

Beautiful Losers

states into integrated, supra-national blocs and thereby to supersede
national sovereignty was manifest in the U.N. treaty, regional or
global security pacts, and collective treaties that overrode the legal
and institutional arrangements of particular nations and cultures.

It is precisely because of such tendencies, executed in the name
of “world peace,” the “global economy,” and “transnational issues”
and generally emanating from the executive branch, that congres¬
sional conservatives today resist monopolization of foreign policy
by the executive as they resisted it in the days of Bricker and Taft.
Despite the institutional corruption of Congress by its own absorp¬
tion into the “administrative state” (another label for the “manage¬
rial state” applied by the contributors to the Heritage Foundation’s
recent volume on The Imperial Congress ), at least some states and
congressional districts and their representatives retain sufficient
autonomy to offer an effective brake on some executive branch
policies that in effect would jeopardize not only national inter¬
ests abroad but also the integrity of freedom and sovereignty at
home.

Conservatives may well support presidents like Ronald Reagan
who seek to restore strength abroad in opposition to partisan and
ideological distraction in Congress; but to leap from such practical
measures to a philosophic defense of a presidential monopoly in
foreign policy could lead alarmingly close to future compromises of
traditional conservative commitments to limited government and
national independence.

The original idea of postwar American conservatism and of the
“Reagan Revolution” was not simply to take over the American mega¬
state but to begin dismantling it; not for conservatives to lodge them¬
selves in the institutional woodwork of the federal bureaucracy but
to start reducing its size, its costs, its personnel, and its powers.
That goal involved deregulation of the economy and restoration of
authority and independence to states and localities, but also a dimi¬
nution of the powers of the presidency and the augmentation of the
powers of the Congress as the representative of local and state com¬
munities, the expression of the deliberate sense of the American
people. Not only has that goal not been achieved, but now appears a
body of ideas that supports a shift in the goal itself, the beginnings

Imperial Conservatives ?

175

of a theoretical justification on ostensibly conservative grounds of
the mega-state and of the centralized power of the presidency as its
core. In recapitulating the liberal defense of the “imperial presi¬
dency,” conservatives may soon find themselves metamorphosing
into something they never wanted to be.

Inhospitable Neos

A Reply to Ernest Van den Haag

Ernest Van den Haag has Been an active and valuable voice in
American conservatism for over thirty years, and no one on the
American Right would seem to be better qualified to survey the
battlefields of “the war between Paleos and Neos” and to reconcile
the opposing sides. Yet his account of the conflict is that of a par¬
tisan. not an even-handed elder statesman. His characterization of
the Old Right or “paleoconservatives” is subtly inaccurate and mis¬
leading, and his conclusion — that the paleos are to blame for the
war and had better give up before they jeopardize the larger crusade
against the Left — casts the Old Right as the agents of a “petty and
counterproductive” resentment and seeks to legitimize neoconser¬
vatism as the authentic American Right. 1

Nowhere in his article does Mr. Van den Haag refer to the long
series of slights, slanders, and backhanded power-plays that some
neoconservatives, in the view of many paleos, have directed at the
Old Right. The smear campaign against M. E. Bradford in 1981 over
the appointment to the National Endowment for the Humanities
chairmanship is perhaps the best known such incident, but almost
every Old Rightist can detail others of a similar character. Such
tactics were generally unknown to intraconservative disputes be¬
fore the last decade, and, more than any “sectarian” purism on the
part of Old Right ideologues, they help to account for the paleo-neo
war and for the continuing suspicion in which many paleos hold
their neo cousins.

Mr. Van den Haag tends to minimize ideological distinctions among
neos and paleos and to emphasize what he calls “sociological” dif¬
ferences between them. Yet his “sociology” is really a polemical

1 This article is in response to Ernest Van den Haag, “The War between Paleos
and Neos,” Rational Review (February 24, 1989). Professor Van den Haag replied to
my response in the same issue of Rational Review as the one in which this article
was published, April ", 1989.

176

Inhospitable Neos

111

weapon. By depicting paleos as a breed of Babbitts and Dan Quayles
of liberal folklore, who inherited their ideology along with their
golf clubs, he tries to dismiss them intellectually. By contrast, “the
Neos became anti-Communists and finally conservatives not by in¬
heritance, but by conversion,” and “some of the Neos have thought
more deeply and systematically about their new beliefs than most
of those who absorbed them at their father’s knee.”

But the conflict between paleos and neos has largely been one
among intellectuals, and the Old Right intelligentsia certainly did
not inherit its ideas (or indeed much wealth) from its forebears. The
biographies of James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall,
Whittaker Chambers, and Richard Weaver, among others, should
testify to this fact. All were Old Right intellectuals whom contem¬
porary paleo intellectuals respect, and most passed through the cru¬
cible of communism or far-Left ideology before they forged their
anticommunism and their various formulations of conservatism.

I am not aware of too many neos who were as seriously involved
with the hard Left as many of the older paleos were, nor, despite the
maturation of the “Second Thoughts” generation, do I know of too
many who agonized over their intellectual and spiritual break with
the Left as those of the Old Right did. The most representative neos,
it seems, emerged from the liberal Left, a persuasion that, because of
its deep permeation of the dominant American culture, is often more
difficult to extirpate from the mind than outright Marxism. Philo¬
sophically, the main Old Right charge against the neos has been that
they have not entirely broken with that persuasion; that, consciously
or unconsciously, they retain what James Burnham called the “emo¬
tional gestalt of liberalism,” despite their overt rupture with its for¬
mal doctrines and policies.

When Mr. Van den Haag gets to the paleos’ “intellectual leaders,”
it is only to relegate them to the old curiosity shop. They “trace the
legitimacy of their beliefs to the past. Not uncommonly they are
laudatores temporis acti. Some are romantic medievalists, others
Aristotelians, or followers of Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and
Samuel Johnson. Nothing wrong with these mentors; but, perhaps,
they are a little too distant from industrial society to have the an¬
swers to current problems.” Perhaps they are — if, as the liberal Left
believes, the nature of man and society changes in accordance with

178

Beautiful Losers

economic and social structures. That is one of the presuppositions
that Old Right intellectuals exorcised from their minds. Perhaps the
neos haven’t.

Mr. Van den Haag is in error when he says Edmund Burke “un¬
helpfully described capitalism as the age of ‘sophisters, economists,
and calculators.’ ” Russell Kirk has generally emphasized the agree¬
ment of Burke and Adam Smith on economic matters, and F. A.
Hayek has generally been sympathetic to Burke. In fact, Burke was
describing the attack on Marie Antoinette by a revolutionary mob,
and his phrase refers to the brutal misapplication of economic and
utilitarian standards to social, political, moral, and aesthetic insti¬
tutions. Unlike the liberal Left, Burke did not subscribe to a mate¬
rialistic reductionism, and that too is one of the premises that the
Old Right has been careful to uproot from its thought.

Mr. Van den Haag also seems to equate “conservatism’’ with “de¬
mocracy and capitalism,’’ though neither term is defined, and the
neos’ adherence to them is taken as proof of the legitimacy of their
conservatism. Yet paleoconservatives (and most conservatives
throughout history) have been skeptical of “democracy.” If Mr. Van
den Haag and the neos mean by the term the kind of constitutional
republic the Framers established, there is no disagreement. But it
should be noted that (a) James Madison specifically distinguished
between a republic and a democracy in The Federalist and (b) it is
not clear that the United States today retains the form of govern¬
ment the Framers intended. If “democracy” means what it gener¬
ally has meant — the unrestricted rule of the majority — then the Old
Right dissents. If it means the kind of “social democracy” that Sid¬
ney Hook and Andrei Sakharov endorse, then there must be a lot
more discussion about what kind of conservatives the neos are.

The Old Right has generally supported the rule of law and the
rights of property rather than any specific political and economic
system. Hence, paleoconservatives have generally opposed the civil
rights movement because it sought the legislative creation of rights
derived from a fallible conscience rather than from a historic con¬
sensus ratified through deliberate constitutional processes. They
also opposed the welfare state because it violated historically recog¬
nized property rights for the goals of “economic justice” and collec¬
tive affluence. Neoconservative economic thought has tended to

Inhospitable Neos

179

replace both Old Right and libertarian concerns with property and
freedom with a preoccupation with economic growth and national
prosperity. Perhaps the sophisters and calculators remain amongst
us.

Mr. Van den Haag also makes much of the different priorities of
neos and paleos, contrasting the secularism of the former with the
“transcendent moral order” emphasized by the latter. The distinc¬
tion is generally valid, though some paleos are not religious at all.
But Mr. Van den Haag misses the point of the distinction. No one
denies that regimes acknowledging a transcendent moral order can
be and sometimes have been cruel and oppressive or that purely
secular states can be benevolent. The Old Right point is that the
recognition of a transcendent moral order at least allows for an
ethical criticism and eventual change of the flaws of the secular
regime, while the denial of such an order removes the ground of
such a critique. The state that denies there is anything higher than
its will is likely to be an unpleasant one sooner or later, given the
well-known proclivities of human nature. Certainly it is true that “a
regime influenced by the secular Andrei Sakharov, or by the reli¬
gious Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, would be an immense improvement
over any Communist one.” So would a regime run by Olof Palme or
Harold Wilson, but no real conservative would be satisfied with it,
and the secularist social democratic state that Mr. Van den Haag
seems to prefer would be unable to recognize any higher restraint
on the manipulation of its citizens.

Virtually all Old Rightists would agree with the neos that “reli¬
gion” is “necessary” and would acknowledge its “social functions.”
Eating also is necessary and serves a social function, but that doesn’t
tell you what or how much to eat. If the neos have nothing more to
say about the role of religion in society than this, their contributions
are thin gruel indeed.

Mr. Van den Haag ends his account with an appeal for unity among
conservatives that is really an invitation to the paleos to fold their
flags. It is quite true that neos and paleos agree on many policy (and
even philosophical) issues, but there remain significant differences
among them. There should be no reason why the two cannot bloody
each other in debate but learn from each other and continue to
cooperate politically. The conservative movement has long welcomed

180

Beautiful Losers

internal disagreement — among libertarians and traditionalists, his-
toricists and apostles of the natural law, Bradfordites and Jaffaites,
even among free marketeers and a Keynesian conservative. But the
neos themselves do not seem to welcome this kind of exchange or
understand how to conduct it.

The neos seem to be no less uncomfortable with the paleos than
the paleos are with the neos, and however “inclusive and latitudi-
narian” the neos may be toward each other, paleos have not found
them particularly hospitable. Neoconservative influence is domi¬
nant at various philanthropic foundations, but paleoconservatives’
grant proposals have often been refused. Such institutions frequently
have endowed lucrative academic chairs for neoconservative schol¬
ars while lifelong paleoconservative intellectuals must scrape and
hoe to sustain themselves in the twilight of their careers. Neocon¬
servatives sponsor many academic and think-tank seminars but pa¬
leoconservatives are seldom invited.

One of the few efforts to bring neos and paleos together to air
their differences occurred at the meeting of The Philadelphia Soci¬
ety in 1986. It was organized by paleos, and ended with neo accusa¬
tions (generally whispered in private after the event) of racism, anti-
Semitism, and extremism. In short, the mind-set of the neos toward
the paleos is pretty much the same as that of liberals and the Left
toward conservatives. The neos seem to think the paleos are “the
stupid party,” if not actually dangerous.

Yet neoconservatism is itself something of a danger to the conser¬
vative coalition because, through their replication of liberal-Left
premises in contemporary policy debates, the neos may undermine
the intellectual opposition to a dominant liberalism. Coalitions and
elections will come and go, but only if a coherent and genuinely
anti-liberal conservatism persists can the Right hope to preserve the
basis for future coalitions and electoral victories. The neos ought to
examine their own presuppositions more deeply than they seem to
have done and show themselves a bit more willing to learn from a
school that has been around rather longer than some of them.

As We Go Marching

Gregory A. Fossedal,

The Democratic Imperative:

Exporting the American Revolution

“When a term has become so universally sanctified as ‘democ¬
racy’ now is,” wrote T. S. Eliot in 1939, “I begin to wonder whether
it means anything, in meaning too many things: it has arrived per¬
haps at the position of a Merovingian Emperor, and wherever it is
invoked, one begins to look for the Major of the Palace. ... If anybody
ever attacked democracy, I might discover what the word meant.”

If Eliot could read Gregory A. Fossedal ’s The Democratic Imper¬
ative, he would remain as mystified today as he was fifty years ago.
Mr. Fossedal certainly does not attack democracy, and his response
to the classical criticism of it is cursory. He dismisses this criticism
in two pages, quoting no less an authority than H. G. Wells to show
that “Aristotle would have enjoyed the electoral methods of our mod¬
ern democracies keenly.” But if Mr. Fossedal does not reveal the
meaning of democracy by attacking it, neither does he clarify it by
any precise definition. Not until the end of the second chapter does
it occur to him that some clarification of what he has been and will
be talking about throughout his book might be called for. Although
he is content to relegate his definition to a long footnote, the pas¬
sage merits quotation at length and consideration in depth.

In this book, the term [’’democracy”] refers to a political system run by
leaders chosen in periodic elections open to general participation and free
debate. These leaders serve a government of limited powers, with certain
rights such as free speech, a fair trial to those accused of serious crimes, and
so on, the denial of which is beyond the state’s reach. It is assumed that with
those rights intact, voters will be able to choose the optimal arrangements
for, say, economic freedom.

The crucial footnote continues for most of the page with further
distinctions and elaborations, but neither there nor elsewhere does

181

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Beautiful Losers

Mr. Fossedal tell us what certain key elements of his definition mean.
How “general” does participation have to be before a nondemo-
cratic system becomes democratic? What are “free debate,” “free
speech,” and a “fair trial”? What is “and so on”? The content and
meaning of such terms are so variously interpreted in the United
States and other countries that reliance on them for defining a word
such as “democracy” is not helpful. Moreover, it is odd that Mr.
Fossedal nowhere specifically includes in his understanding of
democracy the element of opposition, though the right or power of
opposition to an incumbent set of rulers is essential to most Western
ideas of freedom.

In the second paragraph of the Great Footnote, Mr. Fossedal tells
us, “For the purposes of this book, where an advance of economic
or civil freedom occurs, even without the function of a represen¬
tative body, it will be equated with an advance of ‘democracy.’ ” But
in the next paragraph, he says he “will not be offended if readers
mentally scribble in the word ‘representative’ before the word ‘democ¬
racy’ wherever it appears throughout most of the book.” Thus, we
are to assume that Mr. Fossedal’s democracy is representative, even
when there is no representation.

To clarify further what he means, Mr. Fossedal has appended to
his book three world maps for the years 1875, 1935, and 1988, to
show the ebb and flow of democracy across the globe, rather like the
advertisements for Sherwin-Williams paint. The first map shows
Panama and Yugoslavia as nondemocracies, though neither state
existed in 1875. It also shows the whole of the continental United
States in 1875 as simply “democratic,” but the U.S. territory of Alaska
is only “partly democratic,” though much of the western part of the
country then enjoyed precisely the same legal and political status as
Alaska. Great Britain also is shown as completely democratic in 1875,
though its electorate was still strictly limited according to economic
class and excluded about 80 percent of the adult males and all women;
and its landed aristocracy, established church, and hereditary mon¬
archy and House of Lords were then far more powerful than they
are today. In the U.S. “democracy” of 1875, universal suffrage for
white males existed in all states, though it was not mandated by the
Constitution, and women, blacks, and Indians were not guaranteed
the vote. States determined for themselves who voted; senators were

As We Go Marching

183

not popularly elected, and direct primaries were virtually unknown.
Few reactionaries today would be unhappy with this degree of
democracy.

The map for 1988 tells us that Taiwan and Mainland China belong
in the same category of “partly democratic,” which is a step ahead
of South Africa, Communist Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique, ail
of which are “undemocratic.” Zimbabwe also is classed as '‘undem¬
ocratic,” though on page 203 Mr. Fossedal refers to it as a “one-partv
democracy.” Japan and India are democracies according to the map,
while Mexico is only partly so. In all three countries, however, uni¬
versal suffrage, more-or-less free debate, and regular elections per¬
tain, though single parties have dominated their governments for so
long that formal rights of opposition are somewhat academic. The
reader will be happy to learn that Alaska, still only “partly demo¬
cratic” even in 1935, has by 1988 mastered whatever examinations
Mr. Fossedal put to it and taken its degree as a full democracy.

Whatever democracy is and wherever it might be, Mr. Fossedal’s
book is devoted to the thesis that its development everywhere in the
world should be the main (perhaps the only) goal of American for¬
eign policy. The bulk of his volume expounds how this goal may be
pursued — through propaganda by the broadcasting facilities of the
U.S. government and education by the National Endowment for De¬
mocracy, through support for guerrilla forces, and through interna¬
tional economic policies. Mr. Fossedal begins his book with a salute
to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade as “an active American attempt to
extend democracy beyond its own shores.” Unfortunately, as he
acknowledges, the naifs of the brigade soon met the majors of the
palace in the shape of the Comintern agents who ran the brigade
and used it to try to subvert Spain on behalf of Joseph Stalin. More
fortunately, freedom in Spain was saved by the very undemocratic
General Franco, who knew political fraudulence when he saw it.
The support of communist fronts does not seem to perturb Mr. Fos¬
sedal, however, since he later writes that “the United States should
have considered support for the African National Congress as early
as 1983,” despite the control of the ANC and its terrorism by the
Soviet Union and the South African Communist party. Ev en if all the
members of the ANC were dev oted readers of Human Events , how ¬
ever, to support an armed insurgency in another country is an act of

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Beautiful Losers

war. It does not occur to Mr. Fossedal that what he is contemplating
is unprovoked aggression against a state that has never threatened
the United States and in fact has been its loyal supporter since World
War II.

Instead of spending his energies in the study of how the United
States could export democracy, Mr. Fossedal might have been better
advised to have concentrated on pondering three fundamental ques¬
tions, affirmative answers to which appear to be largely unexam¬
ined presuppositions of his book.

First, he might have asked whether democracy is an intrinsically
good form of government. If the contemporary United States is the
model of democracy, the answer is not self-evident. The expansion
of the franchise in the United States has occurred in tandem with
the enlargement and centralization of the state, with reliance on
socialist economic policies, and with the systematic use of concen¬
trated power to uproot social institutions and classes, cultural pat¬
terns, and local and regional pluralism. Despite the vast technological
and economic resources of the United States, American democracy
is only marginally able to protect its citizens and interests abroad
and seems utterly incompetent to enforce minimal standards of
order at home. The criminal corruption of officeholders — in Con¬
gress, the executive branch, and in many urban and state govern¬
ments — is commonplace, but corruption in the broader sense of the
use of public power for private ends, ideological or material, is so
routine that it has become an acknowledged part of our government.

These disadvantages might be bearable if democratization were
accompanied by an enlarged control of governmental power at the
popular level, but this does not seem to be the case. Despite univer¬
sal suffrage, increased openness in government, and more active
participation in some public forums, American democracy is gov¬
erned largely by a permanent and only partially visible elite of bu¬
reaucrats, managers, advisers, staff aides, technicians, and clerks
whose role in decision making is seldom disclosed, whose power is
never subjected to popular judgment, and whose ability to subvert,
co-opt, or deflect even the most intrepid reformers of the Right or ,[
Lett seems virtually invincible. Even in popular elections, the de¬
pendence of candidates and parties on massive amounts of money
and the arts of political manipulation serves not to enhance popular

1

As We Go Marching

185

control but to avoid it, leading to what liberal journalist Sidney
Blumenthal has called “the engineering of consent with a vengeance.”

It may be that there is no necessary connection between the forms
and processes of American democracy and these obvious flaws of
the current political order, though their historical conjunction sug¬
gests that there may well be a connection. In any case, Mr. Fossedal
does not consider the question.

Secondly, Mr. Fossedal might have asked, assuming that democ¬
racy is a good or desirable form of government, whether it is possi¬
ble in various non- Western or nonmodern states and societies. His
assumption, again, is affirmative, based in large part on a wave of
democratic movements of the 1980s in such societies as the Philip¬
pines, South Korea, and several Latin American states. Yet he con¬
ducts no serious analysis of this trend, its causes, its capacities for
success, or its possible consequences. While Mr. Fossedal recog¬
nizes the connections between economic strength and a stable lib¬
eral democracy, he tends to neglect other preconditions, such as a
high degree of literacy, a stable infrastructure of governmental con¬
trol, a national consensus shared by all parts of the population, and,
perhaps most important, a cultural tradition that includes the many
presuppositions about power and its uses characteristic of Western
society. Mr. Fossedal does not sufficiently reflect upon the fact that
Western democracy is less the product of “natural rights” than of
several centuries of evolution within a particular civilization that
recognizes and rewards individuality and opposition to a far greater
degree than Oriental, African, and Islamic cultures do. Such con¬
cepts as a “loyal opposition,” a public rather than a dynastic or
patrimonial idea of political office, a distinction between secular
and religious authority, the legitimacy of political involvement by
subordinate social groups, the effectiveness of voting, a national
rather than a tribal, feudal, or sectarian identity, and the willingness
of those who control the instruments of force to abide by noncoer-
cive political decisions all are basic to Western ideas of modern
democracy but may not pertain in many non-Western or pre-mod¬
ern societies and may not be exportable in the same way that Coca
Cola is.

Mr. Fossedal does not consider the argument that Latin America
seems to undergo cycles of democracy and dictatorship at intervals

186

Beautiful Losers

of every thirty years. He never mentions the classic case of the
Weimar Republic, in which a society utterly unprepared for democ¬
racy voted itself into dictatorship. He never discusses the concept of
“totalitarian democracy,” in which mass participation is manipu¬
lated to represent the General Will, the Volk , the proletariat, the
People, or other abstractions useful to modern tyrants. Nor does he
deal with the argument that democratic movements in many Third
World societies may be the expressions of relatively new, modern¬
ized elites of intellectuals and technocrats alienated from traditional
ruling classes composed of clergy, landowners, and military and
who may seek to use democracy as a means of displacing the older
elites and seizing power for themselves. Such new classes in Third
World states, as political scientist Barry Rubin has argued, can easily
form the social base of modern dictatorships rather than democ¬
racy. It may be that democracy is indeed on the march across the
globe, but Mr. Fossedal does not consider the alternatives sufficiently
to persuade us.

Thirdly, Mr. Fossedal does not deal at all adequately with the
question of whether the export or development of democracy is
compatible with American national interests. Given the way in
which he defines “national interest,” however, he manages to give a
quick and easy affirmative answer to this question as well.

“The purpose of American foreign policy, then,” he writes, “can¬
not be explained without first answering a prior question: What is
the purpose of the American government? To know what we are for
in the world, we must know what we are for at home. . . . The goal,
as our framers put it, is to secure the rights of mankind.” Mr. Fos¬
sedal goes so far as to suggest that anyone who doubts that the
purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to promote the “rights of man” is
un-American — “To argue against a foreign policy to promote the
rights of man, then, is to argue against the rights themselves, and
thus against our own institutions” — and he relies on the equality
clause of the Declaration of Independence to justify his interpreta¬
tion of America’s purpose.

We have been through all this before, but let us rehearse it briefly
once again. The Declaration says nothing about the “purpose” of
the U.S. or any other government. It is not even a charter of govern¬
ment but a proclamation of national independence and a catalogue

As We Go Marching

187

of the abuses of power that justified the act of separation. The real
purposes or goals of the U.S. government are quite clearly spelled
out in the Preamble of the Constitution, and they say nothing about
equality, human rights, or even foreign policy. The Constitution did
not establish the political equality of individual citizens, and its
toleration of slavery, the nonenfranchisement of blacks in most non¬
slave states, the diversity of state political practices and the indirect
election of senators and the president Would seem to contradict the
Straussian-Jaffa-Charles Kesler interpretation of the American politi¬
cal tradition that Mr. Fossedal endorses.

From the false premise that the “rights of man” are the goal of the
U.S. government, Mr. Fossedal draws the non sequitur that the same
goal and purpose must animate our foreign policy. It is at this point
that his book ceases to be merely frivolous and becomes dangerous.
Other possible goals of foreign policy — national independence, ter¬
ritorial security, economic prosperity, and the physical protection
of our own citizens and their property, rights, and interests at home
and abroad — simply are not encompassed within Mr. Fossedal’s
goals. Indeed, it is possible that a good many of our legitimate na¬
tional interests would be transgressed by Mr. Fossedal’s foreign pol¬
icy. Treaties with nondemocratic governments, private business
contracts enforced by them, and geopolitically necessary alliances
with them might all be jeopardized by the democratically elected
regimes that replaced them. The genuine democratization of the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, for example, would almost cer¬
tainly transform world power relationships and perhaps lead to the
disintegration of the USSR and even to protracted warfare in Europe,
Western Asia, and the Far East. “Majority rule” in South Africa al¬
most certainly would result in an anti-Western (and probably bru¬
tally racist) government oriented toward the Soviet Union and com¬
manding the sea routes and vast mineral resources of the southern
African subcontinent. The democratization of Saudi Arabia or other
Persian Gulf states could lead to radical Islamic and anti-Western
regimes that could jeopardize oil flows to the West. The democra¬
tization of Greece has already led to the most anti-American govern¬
ment in Europe, and the democratization of Spain has already en¬
dangered our military bases there. The democratization of the
Philippines has led to the doubling of the communist insurgency

188

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there, to increased political corruption and anti-Americanism, and
also to endangerment of our bases.

Mr. Fossedal’s division of the world into "democracies” and non¬
democracies proceeds from an abstraction that bears no relation¬
ship to concrete U.S. interests or to what the United States must do
to protect those interests. It lumps pro-American but nondemocratic
governments such as those of South Africa and Chile in the same pot
with nondemocratic enemies like Cuba and the Soviet Union. It puts
democratic close allies such as Great Britain in the same camp as
democratic uncooperative governments like India. It places irrele¬
vant democratic states such as Botswana on the same level as states
like democratic Japan. The fact is that democracy/nondemocracv is
simply not a useful standard by which to govern our foreign policy.
It obscures or ignores too many other significant variables to offer a
reliable guide for evaluating our interests or knowing how to pursue
them.

One of the persistent flaws of Mr. Fossedals book is his confusion
of democracy with liberal government, though F. A. Hayek in The
Constitution of Liberty long ago clearly distinguished them: "Lib¬
eralism is a doctrine about what the law ought to be, democracy a
doctrine about the manner of determining what will be the law.” As
Hayek (and many others) noted, there is no necessary connection
between liberalism and democracy, and in fact liberal government
was secured in England and the United States in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries well before the advent of democracy. The
growth of democracy, as noted above, is historically associated with
the diminution of liberal government.

Yet one of the characteristic beliefs of the modern democratic
Left has been that democracy is essential for the protection of lib¬
eral government. Mr. Fossedal adheres to this belief and states it
explicitly: "It may be possible that other forms of government would
satisfy the rights of man, but practical human experience suggests
that certain institutions are needed for government to respect those
rights consistently.” Among these institutions, he suggests, are elec¬
tions, constitutions, and divisions of powers, though the latter two
are properly liberal rather than democratic institutions. In any case,
his statement is simply erroneous.

As We Go Marching

189

It is a fallacy of both the liberal and the democratic mind that a set
of formal procedures, by itself, will protect freedom. A more real¬
istic view has long recognized that while certain procedures can
help protect freedom under some circumstances, in other circum¬
stances they only endanger it. This is why the case of the Weimar
Republic, which enjoyed the formal procedures of liberalism and
democracy, is classic. The procedures and forms of liberalism, de¬
mocracy, or any other constitutional type must reflect a balance of
power among significant social forces — e.g., rural vs. urban, busi¬
ness vs. labor, religion vs. secular authority, class vs. class, region vs.
region — if they are to institutionalize real freedom and social diver¬
sity and enhance the level of civilization. The existence of this kind
of balance may be formalized through legal and political proce¬
dures, but it can exist independently of them as well, and while
clear and stable procedures are helpful in institutionalizing the bal¬
ance of social forces, it is the substance and not the form that is
important. Statesmen should design the forms to reflect the sub¬
stance, as The Federalist recognized, and not try to engineer the
substance to fit forms derived from “natural rights” or other ab¬
stractions. Like the man who believes that milk comes from super¬
markets rather than from the careful cultivation of cows, liberals
and democrats believe that freedom comes from the procedures
themselves, and they ignore or take for granted the underlying and
largely invisible social and cultural substratum that allows proce¬
dural liberalism and democracy to flourish. Unlike Hayek, they fail
to recognize that “freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of
civilization.”

Moreover, if the pluralism offered by the balance of social and
political forces is not to degenerate into an anarchical factionalism,
it must be limited by common acceptance of a social myth that at
least implicitly defines the ends of the public order and the legiti¬
mate means by which they may be pursued. Mr. Fossedals “natural”
or “human” rights provide one such myth that has proved useful to
certain groups aspiring to power throughout modern history, but
the universalism of this myth tends to ignore or ev en undermine the
particular cultural framework and social balances necessary for the
preservation of concrete freedoms. In any case, whether the dis-

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tinctlv post-Christian, Western myth of “human rights” exerts any
enduring appeal to non- Western cultures is a question Mr. Fossedal
never explores seriously.

Mr. Fossedal’s prolonged ode to global democracy is characteris¬
tic of the neoconservative-social democrat-Straussian-“progressive
conservative” school of political thought that now seems to prevail
on the mainstream American Right. Both his text and his acknowl¬
edgements are filled with quotations from the exponents of this
movement and expressions of gratitude to them. The chief goal of
this movement seems to be not a serious exploration of and chal¬
lenge to the presuppositions of the dominant American political
culture but rather the pursuit of its own political and cultural power.
Flence, it is content to adapt prevailing liberal humanist presupposi¬
tions to its own purposes and avoids expressing any thought (or
tolerating expressions by anyone else) that might offend, threaten,
or frighten our own Majors of the Palace who guard the public dis¬
course. To challenge the dominant presuppositions would mean
isolation from the mainstream of political debate that these presup¬
positions define and would make the quest for power far more diffi¬
cult. The result has been the intellectual impoverishment of the
American Right, the emasculation of a genuinely radical conser¬
vatism, and its replacement by bubble-talk and sophomoric cant
more suitable for the Boy Scout Jamboree than for consideration by
grown men and women concerned with the prospects of their civic
culture. Mr. Fossedal’s contribution to the body of thought and
scholarship produced by this movement is no doubt destined to find
a place as one of its classic expressions.

Rouge on a Corpse’s Lips

Whittaker Chambers,

Ghosts on the Roof:

Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers,
19311959

Two ironies attend the life and career of Whittaker Chambers.
The first is that the one-time communist spy, foreign editor of Time ,
and witness against Soviet espionage became notable during his life
and afterwards only because of the Hiss case, which brought him
such notoriety that his career as a professional journalist came to a
quick end. The second is that the Hiss case itself was a distraction
from Chambers’s larger legacy as a thinker and writer to a world he
believed was dying, even though his reputation issued from the Hiss
case and from what he had to tell that world about the meaning of
the case. Unable to continue the profession he followed after leaving
the Soviet underground, Chambers evolved into a prophetic figure,
an almost Dostoevskian character, whose brooding vision of a dec¬
adent West engaged in a desperate death struggle with communism
and with its own poisons has haunted those few Westerners who
have perceived the unfulfilled greatness of the man.

Terry Teachout’s collection of Chambers’s miscellaneous writ¬
ings, from the Marxist fiction of his early days to his last mordant
syllables in National Review , is in part intended to correct the view
we have had of Chambers as either (on the Left) a “messianic anti¬
communist” or (to much of the Right) a bottomless pit of often
lachrymose horror stories about the god that failed and its worship¬
pers. It is no fault of Mr. Teachout’s that his anthology does not
entirely succeed in this effort. What Chambers wrote for Time and
Life during the period he called in Witness “The Tranquil Years”
conspicuously lacks the power that Witness itself, the posthumous
Cold Friday , and his letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., possess. That
is not entirely Chambers’s fault either; the pieces for Time and Life
contain most of the flaws those magazines have inflicted on the

191

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Beautiful Losers

reading public throughout their history. Usually, when Chambers’s
own glimpses of some of the major minds of his era — Albert Ein¬
stein, Arnold J. Toynbee, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Joyce — were
allowed to be seen, they were quickly dimmed by editorially neces¬
sary trivia about personalities and the glib oversimplifications in
which American mass journalism likes to swaddle itself.

Nor. probably, was Chambers yet capable of that power. Only
when the ordeal of the Hiss case had brought him to that “last path
of the earth, in the Scythian country, in the untrodden solitude” of
which he wrote in Cold Friday, when his mind had been stripped
and concentrated on the meaning of his life and its meaning for the
West, did he become privy to his country’s fate and able to foretell
and analyze it in his final testimony.

Yet the glimpses are there, and to those who recognize in Whit-
taker Chambers not only a man who altered the course of history
but also one of the most compelling American writers of this cen¬
tury, Mr. Teachout s anthology is indispensable. It includes four
short stories Chambers wrote for the New Masses while he was still
a fledgling apparatchik. It continues with all the major essays and
reviews he wrote for Time and Life in the 1940s, when his mind had
been cleared of Marxism and was beginning to see more distinctly
the lines his age was etching in the dust of history, down through his
contributions to the American Mercury and National Review, when
he had become the prophet for a cause. But even in the early short
stories, despite their rigid adherence to the party line, the embryo
of the mature Chambers is visible.

The major value of Mr. Teachout’s collection consists not so much
in the intrinsic worth of what Chambers was writing in his early
postcommunist period as in what these pieces show about the de¬
velopment of Chambers’s mind and world-view. By examining what
he had to say in the Tranquil Years, before the Hiss case forced him
for the rest of his life to defend his own integrity and to play a role
that merely distracted him and his readers from his essential mes¬
sage, we now can see more plainly not only what Chambers had to
tell the West about its enemies in Moscow and their agents in Wash¬
ington but also what he wanted to tell the West about itself. That
message, whatever happens to communism and the West in the fu¬
ture, is likely to prove more enduring than the facts about the Wood-

Rouge on a Corpse ’s Lips

193

stock typewriter, the prothonotary warbler, and the vapid young
traitor whose perjury made Chambers famous.

“The social symbol of our age,” Chambers wrote in the American
Mercury > in 1944, “is autolysis, a medical term for the process whereby
the stomach, for example, by a subtle derangement of its normal
functions, destroys itself by devouring its own tissues.” He could
not, before the Hiss case, fully substantiate his belief, implicit in this
passage, that the West was dying by suicide. To have done so would
have involved telling what he later would tell the House Committee
on Un-American Activities about his own descent into the Marxist
Avernus, and Chambers was not yet ready to tell, nor was the world
yet prepared to listen. Throughout these popular pieces there runs
the theme of the world-historical meaning of current events and the
suggestion that the West, even as it was crowing with glee in its
triumph over the Axis and its grand illusion of global peace and
progress, is of the same flesh with Nineveh and Tyre, yet finds its
own mortality altogether inconceivable. But the experiences that
had brought Chambers to this bleak vision remained known only to
him, and his effort to convince his readers of his belief, never quite
fully stated in these pieces, relied on symbolism and suggestion
rather than the police blotter factuality of Witness and the hearing
room. “The rouge applied by an undertaker to the lips of a 2()th
Century corpse,” he wrote in Time in 1947, “is one measure of 20th
Century civilization. But modern man’s effort to deny or minimize
death is part of a much more important necessity — the need to deny
or minimize God.”

To Chambers, the most complete organization of that need was
communism itself, “the world’s second oldest faith,” as he calls it in
Witness, whose “promise was whispered in the first days of the new
Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be
as gods.’” But communism was not the only manifestation of that
need, which permeated the West and, in what became Chambers’s
view of history, modernity itself. From Toynbee’s A Study of His¬
tory, Chambers came to believe that “one hopeful meaning stands
out: not materialist but psychic factors are the decisive forces of
history.” His seven-part series for Life on “The History of Western
Culture” extrapolates the “psychic factors” that had brought the
West to the brink of its dissolution.

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The Enlightenment, he wrote, was the “one great source of mod¬
ern culture. ” It “rev ised the fundamental idea of man’s destiny and
purpose which civilization had developed over more than 1,000
years” and was “the intellectual chemistry whose gradual precipi¬
tate was the modern mind — secular, practical and utilitarian.” The
denouement of the Enlightenment he saw in the Edwardian era,
which was

the fulfillment of the 18th Century’s Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment’s
basic intuition was the idea of progress — the belief that man, by the aid of
science, can achieve a perfection of living limited only by the imaginative
powers of the mind. Implicitly the Enlightenment denied faith in the name
of science and the Kingdom of God in the name of the kingdom of this
world. It whetted that knife-edge, dividing the world’s greatest focuses of
force — the power of religion and the power of science — along which the
thoughtful man has teetered ever since.

The Edwardians — not merely the British in the decade after Queen
Victoria’s death but also the Americans and Europeans — wrapped
themselves in the exuberant confidence of the Enlightenment’s legacy.
“A new tempo was entering life with the abridgement of time and
distance by speed and the multiplication of power by the generation
of energy. . . . the Edwardian era was one of those rare interludes of
history where everybody who could possibly do so had a wonder¬
ful time.”

Of course, it was all an illusion, had been illusory ever since the
Enlightenment, and would be dashed in World War I and the Rus¬
sian Revolution, the political, economic, and intellectual wreckage
of the twentieth century, and the chaos that ensued. It was neither
Voltaire nor the Edwardians who understood what would happen
when the illusion broke but a squat little gentleman unknown to and
unimagined by their cherubic innocence. “When the train of his¬
tory makes a sharp turn,” said Lenin, “the passengers who do not
have a good grip on their seats are thrown off.”

The shallowness of the Enlightenment and its legacy in the lib¬
eral, democratic, and industrialized West in Chambers’s view had
weakened the grip of Western men on their seats and had failed to
prepare them to survive the sharp turn history was about to take.
That Chambers saw the weakness of Western liberalism in the face

Rouge on a Corpse's Lips

195

of the challenge is clear enough. That is why he can never be a hero
to contemporary anti-Soviet social democrats and neoconserva¬
tives who pride themselves on their pragmatic humanism and their
own adherence to the values of the liberal, modern West. Only by
ignoring Chambers’s dark vision of human unreason and sin and his
belief that liberalism was a close cousin to communism or by twist¬
ing him into a Third Generation yuppie chirping about the Strategic
Defense Initiative, tax cuts, and Jonas Savimbi can today’s “Right”
honestly regard Chambers as an icon. “For, of course,” he wrote in
Life in 1953,

there is a strong family resemblance between the Communist state and the
welfare state. The ends each has in view have much in common. But the
methods proposed for reaching them radically differ. Each is, in fact, in
direct competition with the other, since each offers itself as an alternative
solution for the crisis of the 20th Century; and Fabian Britain has at last
supplanted Soviet Russia in the eyes of political liberals when they look
abroad. Nevertheless, that family resemblance is nerve-wearing, since all the
minds that note it are not equally discriminating, especially in a nation that
has only just become conscious of Communism and still rejects socialism.
So, at every move against Communism, liberal views come unglued, and
liberal voices go shrill, fearing that, by design or error, the move may be
against themselves.

Yet if Chambers rejected twentieth-century liberalism, he was
not much more sympathetic to the conservatives of the 1950s. He
declined to attach himself in any way to Joe McCarthy, less perhaps
from dislike of the man than a belief that McCarthy would even¬
tually taint his witness. He was not comfortable at National Review
and found preposterous the quaint dogmas of classical liberalism
dressed up as conservatism. In a letter to Buckley in 1957, he called
the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises “a goose,” and Frank
Meyer’s self-appointment as the ideological gatekeeper of the Amer¬
ican Right seems first to have amused, then bored, him. The ideas of
Meyer and Russell Kirk struck Chambers as “chiefly an irrelevant
buzz.” Of Kirk’s The Conservative Mind he asked, “if you were a
marine in a landing boat, would you wade up the seabeach at Ta¬
rawa for that conservative position? And neither would I!” Only with
Buckley himself and James Burnham did he seem to share anything
like a common outlook, and at last he resigned from National Re-

196

Beautiful Losers

view , acknowledging to Buckley and himself that he was not a con¬
servative in any serious sense but “a man of the Right.”

What exactly Chambers meant by this term is far from clear, but
he contrasted it with “conservatism” and seems to have identified it
with a defense of capitalism. “I am a man of the Right because I
mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that
capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be,
conservative.” Yet despite his identification with capitalism, almost
nowhere did Chambers offer an explicit defense of it, and in both
his letters to Buckley and in a National Review piece of 1958 on
federal farm policy, he was perfectly conscious of the contradiction
between capitalism and conservatism and the link between cap¬
italism and the advance of socialism. Like most conservatives and
like his neighbors in rural Maryland, Chambers saw the freedom
and independence of farmers threatened by federal regulation of
agriculture. But he also believed such controls were “inescapeable.”

The problem of farm surpluses is, of course, a symptom of a crisis of abun¬
dance. It is the gift of science and technology — improved machines, fertil¬
izers, sprays, antibiotic drugs, and a general rising efficiency of know-how.
The big farm, constantly swallowing its smaller neighbors, is a logical resul¬
tant of those factors. ... If farmers really meant to resist these trends, to be
conservative, to conserve ‘a way of life’ (as they often say), they would smash
their tractors with sledges, and go back to the horse-drawn plow. Of course,
they have no intention of doing anything so prankish. . . . Controls of one
kind or another are here to stay so long as science and technology are with
us.

Chambers’s belief, expressed as early as 1944, that “the land-own¬
ing farmer, big and little, is the conservative base of every healthy
society, no matter how many miles of factories may be required to
keep the average city dweller in a state of civilized neurosis” reflects
an apparent sympathy for agrarianism and the American South. But
his recognition of the self-destructive dynamic of modern capital¬
ism, relying on science, sponsoring continuous enlargement and
social innovation, and eventually spawning socialism, brings him
close to Burnham and Joseph Schumpeter.

Nowhere in all his writing does Chambers more clearly show the
weaknesses of unrestrained capitalism and its kinship with commu¬
nism than in his devastation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in Na-

Rouge on a Corpse's Lips

197

tional Review in 1957. “Randian Man,” he wrote, “like Marxian
man, is made the center of a godless world. ... If Man’s ‘heroism’
... no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless
integrity which was a root of Nietzsche’s anguish, then Man be¬
comes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the con¬
dition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity.”
Like the materialism of “godless communism,” the hedonism of
godless capitalism winds up as the tool of a political despotism that
manages the pursuit of happiness as pleasure.

In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite
(I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-
financial -engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “pro¬
ductive achievement” man s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclu¬
sively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political
bureau.

The significance of Chambers’s witness, then, is considerably
diminished if it is mistaken as merely an account of Soviet commu¬
nism and its Western stooges. His point throughout his writings in
the 1940s and 1950s was that the roots of communism lie in the
West itself and that they flourish because the modern age has chosen
to credit the serpent’s promise. That promise and its lethal conse¬
quences for the West were as palpable to him in the United States of
Truman and Eisenhower as they had been under the Edwardians and
as they were in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Only when
the West had awakened to the falsehood of the promise could it bear
what he called “that more terrible witness” by which it would de¬
stroy its external enemy and begin to purge itself of its internal
toxins. But he had no expectation that the West would do so, and no
suggestions on how to do it.

For all the authority Chambers commanded in Witness , in the last
decade of his life he seemed uncertain about many things and had
no clear answers for the political crises of his age. “There are a lot of
things I am becoming less and less sure about,” he wrote Buckley in
1957. He was not at bottom a political thinker but a Christian exis¬
tentialist who shunned politics by enveloping himself in suffering
and dwelling on the hopelessness of man’s fate without God. Chris¬
tianity and the tragic vision of history became for him an intellec-

198

Beautiful Losers

tual crutch with which history’s walking wounded could limp away
from a battle they could not win. Like Burnham, as Chambers him¬
self wrote to Buckley, he sought “to understand what the reality of
the desperate forces is, and what is their relationship in violent flux,”
and he had what he called “the direct glance that measures what it
leaves without fear and without regret.” But despite his grasp of the
main forces of the twentieth century, Chambers was unable to com¬
municate the realities he saw in a form that would allow a secular
resolution of the challenges they presented. Hence, his response
was one of other-worldly withdrawal — from journalism and Na¬
tional Review to his farm and family, to a furtively private pietism,
to an autobiographical justification of his vision, to a handful of
occasional essays for the conservative press, to an intensely emo¬
tional (often maudlin) prose published mainly in posthumous frag¬
ments and filled with introspection, grotesque anecdotes, bizarre
characters, and metaphors of death, lunacy, and decay. Chambers
relentlessly smashed his readers’ faces against the window panes of
history and forced them to look at scenes few of them wanted to
see. But having shown them the worst that human beings in this
century could do, he had little to offer them except to burrow deeper
within a storm cellar of intense devotionalism. His oeuvre, for all its
merits of style and truth and all that it has to tell the West about why
it is dying, is not what a Marine wading up the seabeach at Tarawa
would carry in his knapsack.

The Secret of the Twentieth Century

Kevin Phillips,

The Politics of Rich and Poor:

Wealth and the American Electorate
in the Reagan Aftermath

When Kevin Phillips’s The Politics of Rich and Poor hit the best¬
seller list last summer, the Gipperites began to squeal like a worn-
out fan belt in a used Toyota. “Anti-Reagan sophistry,” sneered David
Brock of the Heritage Foundation in the Wall Street Journal. “A
book-length tantrum,” wept Warren Brookes in the Washington
Times. “Garbage,” pronounced Republican wheeler-dealer Eddie
Mahe. “I refuse to read that fraud’s book,” declared GOP consultant
John Buckley in what must have been one of the more honest com¬
ments on Mr. Phillips’s most recent contribution to scholarship.

Such, of course, is the predictable reception of a book proposing
ideas and advancing arguments that cannot be comfortably ham¬
mered into existing ideological and partisan holes, and such espe¬
cially is it the kind of reception to be expected from the lowing herd
of pseudoconservatives who in the past decade have succeeded in
hornswoggling themselves into the courtyards (but not the corri¬
dors) of national power. When Mr. Phillips in his youth was design¬
ing the “populist” theories and strategies by which conservative
Republicans could gain the votes of rank-and-file Democrats and
challenge the political hegemony of a liberal elite, these same court¬
iers pranced for joy. Then they were happy to hear of his cyclical
theory of American politics, how at approximately thirty- year inter¬
vals, one political elite is displaced by another when the incumbents
have become a stale establishment. Then they were pleased to clam¬
ber into the cockpit his theory seemed to assign them as the pilots
of the “emerging Republican majority” that would hijack the coun¬
try away from the New Deal coalition.

But it might have occurred to them, as it evidently did not, that if
Mr. Phillips had a shred of intellectual integrity, which he evidently

199

200

Beautiful Losers

has, then sooner or later the cycle he claimed to have discovered
would swing about, and some other rough beast would slouch to¬
ward a political Bethlehem to be born. It is Mr. Phillips's thesis in his
present book that that hour has come round at last, and here he is to
pluck his lyre in honor of the animals arrival.

In other words. Mr. Phillips’s belief that the Reagan era saw the
entrenchment of a new political establishment that is about to be
challenged by a wave of populist revolt is merely the logical exten¬
sion of the interpretation of American politics that he first advanced
(and which most conservatives embraced) in 1969 and has adapted
and amended in a series of later books ever since. Remaining faith¬
ful to and consistent with his own theory does not make him, as
conservative chuckleheads claim, a ‘liberal"; then again, it doesn't
make him right either.

What really makes the Gipperites gasp, however, is not just Mr.
Phillips’s prediction that Reaganism is scheduled to fail politically
but also that Good Old Dutch and his “revolution" were in large
part fraudulent — that, far from helping the middle-income strata of
the electorate who enabled Reagan to win and hold the White House,
the economic, fiscal, and regulatory policies of the 1980s gave these
very groups a fat lip. while allowing the corporate rich, a cadre of
felonious financial wizards, and a select band of well-fed “conser¬
vative populists" to become opulent. Mr. Phillips buttresses this ar¬
gument with the same kind of statistical megatonnage that has made
his other books so formidable, and he has framed it in a breezy style
laced with anecdotes that lend life to his numbers.

Here the reader nostalgic for the 1980s may trip down memory’s
lane to such triumphs of “populism” as Malcolm Forbes’s birthday
party in 1989, complete with Moroccan horsemen. Here he may
revisit such glowing symbols of Mr. Reagan's Augustan age as the
teeth of Ivan Boesky. the modest couture of Nancy, and the cultural
renaissance spawned by the baby-boomers. Here too the reader may
glimpse through the glory of the Reaganite dawn such misty ves¬
tiges of the old America as family farms now repossessed by banks
and sold to corporations in New York and Japan, mines and facto¬
ries now idle, and endless tracts of American land and buildings
once actually owned by Americans themselves.

But to be quite fair. Mr. Phillips rather exaggerates the economic

The Secret of the Twentieth Century

201

damage done to the American middle class in the Reagan era. He
acknowledges that the real losers in those years were largely con¬
fined to certain categories — “manufacturing employees, farmers,
people in the oil industry, young householders and the working
poor” — while others held steady or made small gains. The latter,
however, were able to do so largely because their wives left home
and went to work and because they simply worked harder to keep
afloat. From 1973 to 1987, Mr. Phillips points out, Americans’ lei¬
sure time actually fell by 37 percent, from 26.2 hours a week to 16.6
hours, while the real average weekly wage of all workers (white
collar and blue collar) declined from $191.41 a week in 1972 to
$171.07 in 1986 in terms of constant 1977 dollars.

Many families found themselves emptying savings accounts and going into
debt, often to meet the soaring price of home-ownership or to put a child
through college. . . . Homeownership had reached a record 65 percent of
U.S. households in 1980, after climbing steadily from 1940, when 43.6 per¬
cent of households owned their own residences. After 1980, however, the
homeownership rate would drop year by year, falling to 63.8 percent in
1986 and leveling off. Young people, in particular, found that home buying
was next to impossible.

For much of Middle America, then, the Reagan years were troubling and
ambiguous as the contrast intensified between proliferating billionaires and
the tens of millions of others who were gradually sinking.

Mr. Phillips frames much of this economic analysis and what he
calls “plutography” — a neologism that seems destined to enter the
language as easily as his earlier coinage “Sunbelt” — in terms of his
historical theory of American politics. Hence, there is much analo¬
gizing between the Reagan era and those of William McKinley and
the 1920s. “Each Republican coalition,” he writes, “began by empha¬
sizing national themes and unity symbols while subordinating com¬
mercial and financial interests. Lincoln’s struggle to maintain the
union is famous, but lesser efforts by McKinley in 1 896 and Nixon in
1968 go little noticed.” But the phase of appealing to “national unity”
usually doesn’t last long once the GOP sets up shop in the White
House. “Beyond its emphasis on the politics of national unity, dy¬
namic capitalism, market economics and the concentration of wealth
are what the Republican party is all about. When Republicans are in
power long enough, that is what America gets, by the traditional

202

Beautiful Losers

Republican methods of disinflation, limited government, less reg¬
ulation of business, reduced taxation and high interest rates.”

Mr. Phillips may or may not be on firm ground in his analogical
theory. Like most historical interpretations, it is one that can never
be proved and must be tested by its ability to explain known facts.
Moreover, even if it is true, it may reveal the outer mechanics of
American political history, but it doesn’t really grasp the world-
historical drift of what is happening in the United States and the
world in the last part of the twentieth century.

What Mr. Phillips is really talking about, though he may not know
it, is not just the ebb and flow of political parties in White House
and Congress, but rather the continuing civilizational crisis, in its
economic and political phases, of what James Burnham called “the
managerial revolution.” The liquidation of the middle class and its
bourgeois cultural order are essential parts of that revolution, which
does not consist only in the material dimension of the rolling up of
comparatively small owner-operated business enterprises and farm¬
ing units by colossal corporate organizations and the replacement of
local, legislative, and constitutionalist government by centralized,
executive, bureaucratic regimes. It also consists, in its cultural di¬
mensions, in the delegitimization and eventual extirpation of bour¬
geois culture — first on the grounds that that culture is the product of
a selfish “capitalist” oligarchy, and later, in our own times, that it is
the institutional framework by which a “white, male, heterosexual,
Christian” ruling class maintains cultural hegemony. The technically
skilled managerial elites that hold power in corporations, unions,
universities, mass media, foundations, and government cannot se¬
cure and enhance their dominance without also undermining the
cultural basis of bourgeois powTer, which acts as a constraint on the
power of the new elite.

While Mr. Phillips sees American history in terms of a never-end¬
ing conflict between “elite” and “populist” forces, it is perhaps
more accurate to see it in terms of a conflict of one elite against
another. The Progressive Movement and the New Deal represent the
emergence of a managerial elite that holds power through its exper¬
tise in the technical and administrative skills that enable it to oper¬
ate and control overgrown organizations in the state, economy, and
culture and which makes use of what has come to be known as

The Secret of the Twentieth Century

203

liberalism to justify its challenge to an older bourgeois elite that
seized national power in the Civil War and its aftermath. Having
entrenched themselves in political, economic, and cultural power
by the end of World War II, managerial forces were resisted only by
the remnants of the bourgeois elite and by newly formed social
strata that found managerial liberalism a profound source of resent¬
ment and frustration. Until the 1980s, what was known as “conser¬
vatism” generally represented this bourgeois and postbourgeois po¬
litical and cultural resistance to the managerial apparatus of power
and its agenda — heavy regulation of the economy by the state in the
interests of big corporations, unions, and governmental bureaucra¬
cies but at the expense of small businessmen; social reconstruction
in the interests of the underclass and the managerial theoreticians
who designed, planned, and implemented it, but against the inter¬
ests and values of those who had to pay for it and suffer its conse¬
quences; and a globalist foreign policy that vaguely recognized a
communist threat to the country but was steadfast in its refusal to
deal with the menace effectively and adamant in its preference for
transnational diplomacy and global social engineering over any sus¬
tained use of force.

The high point of the bourgeois conservative resistance to the
now dominant managerial regime was the presidential campaign of
Barry Goldwater in 1964, but under Richard Nixon and Ronald
Reagan, “conservatism” began to change its colors. While Nixon
tended toward the abandonment of the pure milk of bourgeois eco¬
nomic dogma — as Mr. Phillips points out, as early as the Checkers
speech, “Nixon had no interest in unbridled capitalism” — he sought
to build what he called the “New American Majority” based pre¬
cisely on those social groups that resented and feared liberal-mana¬
gerial dominance and found it a frustration of their own interests
and aspirations. As Mr. Phillips has also suggested elsewhere, it may
be no accident that it was principally the managerial bureaucracy of
the executive branch in alliance with the managerial intelligentsia
that largely did Nixon in through systematic leakages to the press
during Watergate. But while Nixon seems to have contemplated a
simple abandonment of bourgeois ideology and institutions in favor
of a more centralized and authoritarian managerial regime, Reagan
cooked up something more complicated.

204

Beautiful Losers

It was Reagan’s achievement to formulate an ideology and a polit¬
ical style that could accommodate both postbourgeois resentments
and frustrations through an appeal to "social issues,” patriotism,
and "traditional morality” — what Phillips calls the symbols of "na¬
tional unity” — as well as managerial interests in preserving the scale
and scope of the mass organizations the elite controlled — the cor¬
porations and the federal state. It was not, of course, Mr. Reagan
himself who was the author of this formula, though as a former
liberal Democrat he was a perfect expression of the centrist imagery
that the new formula used. The formula itself was the work of what
came to be called neoconservatism, which distinguished itself from
Old Right bourgeois conservatism by its willingness to accept the
New Deal and the progressivist tradition. The goal of neoconser¬
vatives was never to reverse or move beyond the New Deal legacy but
simply to make it work more efficiently than it did in the 1960s and
1970s. That goal, though usually masked by the neoconservatives
themselves, was obvious to many of the more percipient exponents
of Old Right ideology, but only after Reagan had departed the politi¬
cal scene was the mask thrown off and "Big Government Conser¬
vatism” unveiled in all its splendors.

"Reaganism,” then, was neither a continuation of the bourgeois
conservatism of the Old Right nor one more installment of an eter¬
nally recurring William McKinley nor the culmination of a cycle in
American politics by which one elite ousted another and then itself
succumbed to corruption. It was rather an effort to wed or fuse
those destabilizing movements, fed by resentment, fear, and frustra¬
tion, which gelled in the New Right and the candidacy of George
Wallace, with still-dominant managerial elements in the state, econ¬
omy, and cultural apparatus. Those elements saw their institutional
apparatus of power and the "consensus” that rationalized it jeopar¬
dized by an insurgency from the right as well as from the left in the
1960s and 1970s and by the whole unraveling of American society
that their own efforts at social reconstruction had helped cause. So
far from challenging or displacing an old elite, Reaganism simply
allowed the leadership of the insurgent forces to crawl into bed
with the managerial establishment and sample its favors, thereby
effectively decapitating (or, to extend the sexual metaphor, emascu¬
lating) the insurgency.

The Secret of the Twentieth Century

205

The formula worked as long as the Teflon President was there,
and it has worked for his successor since Good Old Dutch was
strapped to his pony and hauled back to his ranch. But it may not
work much longer if recession and the economic woes Mr. Phillips
discusses pop out of the political woodwork as they seem to be
doing.

What is surprising in Mr. Phillips’s analysis is not his conclusion
that Reaganism actually endangered middle-class aspirations but his
neglect of the continuing power of the cultural and social frustra¬
tions he has so admirably penetrated elsewhere. In his 1982 book,
Post-Conservative America, he predicted that what historian Fritz
Stern called "the politics of cultural despair” — racial, national, and
social hostilities and dislocations — would coalesce with economic
frustrations to yield a chauvinist, authoritarian, and perhaps overtly
racialist political movement on the order of what occurred in Weimar
Germany. In his present book, there is virtually no reference to that
thesis despite its continuing relevance.

Instead, he suggests that a new "populist” movement led by lib¬
eral Democrats in the image of Michael Dukakis, Richard Gephardt,
or Jesse Jackson could successfully challenge the Reaganite Republi¬
can establishment through a "New Nationalist” program that recalls
the similar slogans adopted by Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly
in the early twentieth century. Such a program, as Mr. Phillips envi¬
sions it, would evidently be little more than a revival of the redistri-
butionist politics and policies of the progressivist, New Deal, and
Great Society eras. What he does not seem to recognize is that the
kind of electoral coalition necessary for this kind of movement is
today not possible.

Mr. Phillips’s model presupposes that a crippled middle class could
be brought into the same political tent with an underclass that, he
argues, also suffered from the policies of the Reaganite corporate
establishment. The fact is that in the 1990s the dominant noneco¬
nomic issue that is emerging is that of race and group identity —
manifested in the rise of black demagogues such as Jackson, Louis
Farrakhan, Marion Barry, A1 Sharpton, and a host of lesser fry, as
well as in white counterparts like David Duke and those who will
soon be emulating him. The Reaganite formula did not really close
the fissures that were causing what Mr. Phillips earlier called the

206

Beautiful Losers

“Balkanization of America” but only covered them up with a gener¬
ous serving of political applesauce, and the emergence of overt ra¬
cialism is one species of the decomposition and fragmentation that
has been occurring in the United States ever since the unifying bour¬
geois fabric was shredded. But since purely racialist movements can
appeal only to members of a given ethnic group, which by itself is a
minority, no such movement, black or white, can take power in the
United States merely by relying on racial rhetoric and ideology. If,
however, such a movement can synthesize its appeal to group iden¬
tity (racial or national) through an imagery of “us against them”
with a demand for the redress of perceived economic grievances
(the burden of poverty or of taxation or of the loss of a material life¬
style), then it might take wing and fly. Such a synthesis, the com¬
bination of nationalism and socialism that has been the dominant
theme of twentieth-century democratic politics, not only in Weimar
but also in the United States, would broaden the racial and national
appeal beyond biology to non-racial social and political aspirations.

Mr. Phillips is surely aware of the opportunities offered by such a
nationalist-socialist program and of the power of such issues as immi¬
gration, civil rights laws and litigation, and the emergence of a Sore-
lian myth of racial consciousness among American blacks, though
he does not address these opportunities in this book. He does, how¬
ever, quote liberal economist Robert Kuttner on the failure of Michael
Dukakis to exploit the nationalist-socialist synthesis effectively in
1988. Dukakis, in Kuttner’s view, “had violated one of his party’s
basic historical verities: that ‘Democrats do best when they develop
broad, embracing, expansive visions combining national purpose
with economic advancement, and rally masses of non-rich voters.’ ”

That is simply a more elegant way of stating a secret understood
by successful politicians from Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt to
Lyndon Johnson and also by historian John Lukacs, who writes that
nationalism and socialism and their relationship are “the principal
political phenomena of this century.” The political masses are moti¬
vated largely by slogans, programs, and policies that revolve around
the sentiments of “us against them” and “something for nothing.”
As long as the Democrats understood this secret, they flourished.
When they forgot it and went in for Viet Cong flags, paroling rap¬
ists, homosexual rights, national guilt trips, ACLU membership cards,

The Secret of the Twentieth Century

207

and especially for the interests of non-whites at the expense of their
traditional white working-class constituency, they flopped. Mr. Rea¬
gan successfully exploited the Democrats’ neglect of the nationalist
sibling of the nationalist-socialist Siamese twin while seeming to
offer what Mr. Phillips (and the Democrats) argue is an illusory eco¬
nomic security that defused economic issues in politics. Those who
have followed Mr. Reagan are far less aware of the secret power of
group identity and far less skilled in exploiting it, nor will emerging
economic dislocations allow them to rely exclusively on national-
cultural-racial themes to gain and keep power.

If there is to be a successful “new nationalism” in the next decade,
its leaders will have to understand the secret of the twentieth cen¬
tury and how to use it, whether the “nation” is that of Jesse Jackson
or George Wallace. The Politics of Rich and Poor is a good place for
them to begin to understand the economic aspects of that secret,
though it is unfortunate that Mr. Phillips, whose chillingly cold¬
blooded analyses of politics and power have proved so fruitful in
the past, has neglected any clear discussion of the secret in his pres¬
ent book. But he is undoubtedly right that one thing is clear: the
emerging economic dislocations that the Reagan era bequeathed to
the United States will bring an early death to the apparent social and
political equilibrium that characterized the 1980s.

Equality as a Political Weapon

For many years, a staple theme in traditionalist conservative polit¬
ical theory has been the critique of egalitarianism. Indeed, some
Old Right theorists have gone so far as Willmoore Kendall and
George Carey to argue that “the common denominator of the liberal
positions . . . the principles or beliefs common to all of them” is the
principle of equality itself. 1 The conservative critique of egalitarian¬
ism has in large part been a formal critique — that is, one that takes
egalitarian expressions at more or less their face value and then
proceeds to criticize the logic of these expressions or the degree to
which they correspond, or fail to correspond, to the realities of
human nature and human society. Kendall and Carey themselves
initiated a critique of egalitarianism on both philosophical and his¬
torical grounds, arguing that the doctrine of equality as currently
understood by its champions on the Left has little intrinsic merit
and has played a mischievous rather than a wholesome role in Amer¬
ican political thought and history. The historical and political cri¬
tique of egalitarianism among Old Rightists has been ably contin¬
ued by M. E. Bradford in his continuing polemics with Harry Jaffa,
and more recently in the work of Thomas Fleming and Steven Gold¬
berg, among others, the critique has made good use of sociobiology
and anthropology.

The formal critique of egalitarianism by the Right has thus been a
rewarding one, touching on and illuminating political theory, phi¬
losophy, history, and science. But I have to say — and indeed I will
say, perhaps more than anyone wants to hear — that I think much of
the Old Right formal critique of egalitarianism has been somewhat
misdirected. In a sense, I believe that it has been beating a dead
horse — or, more strictly, a dead unicorn, a beast that exists only in
legend. The flaw, I believe, in the conservative formal critique of

1. Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, eds., Liberalism Versus Conserva¬
tism. The Continuing Debate in American Government (Princeton, N. J.: D. Van
Nostrand Company, 1966), 66.

208

Equality as a Political Weapon

209

egalitarianism is that the formal doctrine of equality is itself nonex¬
istent or at least unimportant.

The doctrine of equality is unimportant because no one, save
perhaps Pol Pot and Ben Wattenberg, really believes in it, and no
one, least of all those who profess it most loudly, is seriously moti¬
vated by it. This is a truth expressed by the Italian social theorist
Vilfredo Pareto in his Treatise of General Sociology.

The sentiment that is very inappropriately named equality is fresh, strong,
alert, precisely because it is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not
related to any abstraction, as a few naive “intellectuals” still believe; but
because it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on
escaping certain inequalities not in their favour, and setting up new inequali¬
ties that will be in their favour, this latter being their chief concern.2

The real meaning of the “doctrine of equality,” in other words, can¬
not be grasped, and its real power as a social and ideological force
cannot be countered, merely by a purely formal critique such as that
traditionally mounted by the Old Right. The real meaning of the
doctrine of equality is that it serves as a political weapon, to be
unsheathed whenever it is useful for cutting down barriers, human
or institutional, to the power of those groups that wear it on their
belts; but, because equality, if nothing else, is a two-edged weapon,
it is a sword to be kept well away from the hands of those who
merely want to fondle it.

It was precisely this understanding of equality as a political weapon
that is enshrined in George Orwell’s famous but belated insight in
Animal Farm — that all animals are equal, but some are more equal
than others. Yet the irony of that slogan is perhaps too rich to be
realistic. Orwell’s porcine totalitarians evidently possessed enough
intellectual integrity at least to try to reconcile two contradictory
claims and to juxtapose them in a public display. In the real world of
egalitarian tyranny, as opposed to that of Orwell’s fictional satire,
even that degree of intellectual honesty is absent. Even the Commu¬
nists, despite their own egalitarian dogmas, soon rediscovered the

2. Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society [Tratt a to di Sociologia generate j, ed.
Arthur Livingston, trans. Andrew Bongiorno, Arthur Livingston, and James Harvey
Rogers, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 2:“r35-3(S, § 122"'.

210

Beautiful Losers

elementary facts of human inequality and the elementary principle
of the division of labor and social function, which necessarily in¬
volves economic and social hierarchy. But it is doubtful that any
Communist, however skilled a dialectician, would ever acknowl¬
edge that the existence of a Nomenklatura or entrenched elite in
the Soviet Union in any way needed to be reconciled with Marxist
egalitarian utopianism.

Yet the use of equality as a political weapon was known long
before Orwell, or the Communists, or the radical Enlightenment,
discovered it. At least three authors of classical antiquity recount a
story illustrative of the nature of the weapon and of its valuable
applications.

Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, learned that there were certain
nobles in his city who were conspiring against him, but he was
unable to discover exactly who they were. So he sent an envoy to his
fellow tyrant, Thrasybulus of Miletus, to ask his advice. As the Greek
historian Herodotus described it,

Thrasybulus invited the man to walk with him from the city to a field where
corn was growing. As he passed through this cornfield, continually asking
questions about why the messenger had come to him from Corinth, he kept
cutting off all the tallest ears of wheat which he could see, and throwing
them away, until the finest and best-grown part of the crop was ruined. In
this way he went right through the field, and then sent the messenger away
without a word. On his return to Corinth, Periander was eager to hear what
advice Thrasybulus had given, and the man replied that he had not given any
at all, adding that he was surprised at being sent to visit such a person, who
was evidently mad and a wanton destroyer of his own property — and then
described what he had seen Thrasybulus do. Periander seized the point at
once; it was perfectly plain to him that Thrasybulus recommended the mur¬
der of all the people in the city who were outstanding in influence or ability.
Moreover, he took the advice, and from that time forward there was no crime
against the Corinthians that he did not commit.3

No one would argue that tyrants such as Thrasybulus and Peri¬
ander were egalitarians or that they really believed in or were moti¬
vated by any doctrine of equality founded in Natural Rights or other

3 Herodotus, 5.92, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, 376-77; see also Aristotle, Pol¬
itics, 3. 1 3, trans. Ernest Barker, 135; and Livy, History of Rome, 1.54, trans. Aubrey
de Selincourt, 94, who tells the same story of Tarquinius Superbus and his son, Sextus.

Equality as a Political Weapon

211

pseudosciences, yet their use of equality as a weapon to commit the
crime of what Stefan Possony and Nathaniel Weyl have called “aris-
tocracide,”4 the mass murder of the best elements in a society, and
to cut down the social constraints and potential threats to their
power is not significantly different from the use made of it by mod¬
ern tyrants, whether they are self-proclaimed totalitarians or global
democratists. Indeed, the use of equality as a weapon by the ancient
tyrants, like so much else in classical history and literature, is para¬
digmatic, and in the modern bureaucratic states and managerial re¬
gimes, the same application of egalitarianism is made for the same
reason, though not always as dramatically as in the days of Peri-
ander and Thrasybulus. The irony — not to say the hypocrisy — of
modern egalitarianism is that it is used not, as its proponents claim,
to restrain or reduce the power of all but to get rid of the power of
some while at the same time perpetuating or augmenting the power
of others. It is my view that once this real, as opposed to formal,
meaning of egalitarianism is grasped, the apparent contradiction
between egalitarian preaching and egalitarian practice resolves it¬
self, and the invocation of equality, even in sophisticated ideological
forms, is seen clearly to be not mere hypocrisy or a logical contra¬
diction but the strategic deployment of a weapon for the seizure of
power.

In the twentieth century, egalitarianism has been used princi¬
pally as the political formula or ideological rationalization by which
one, emerging elite has sought to displace from political, economic,
and cultural power another elite, and in not only rationalizing but
also disguising the dominance of the new elite. In the late nine¬
teenth and early twentieth centuries, the development of new physi¬
cal technologies and a new kind of social organization in the form
of bureaucracy served to create within the bosom of traditional aris¬
tocratic and bourgeois elites a new class of functionaries that gained
economic, political, and social rewards from their ability to operate
the new technologies and organizations. In the economy, corpora¬
tions allowed for the bureaucratization of functions, removing the
operation and control of corporate business from the hands of stock-

4. Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan T. Possony, The Geography of Intellect (Chicago:
Henry Regnery Company, 1963), xi.

212

Beautiful Losers

holders and owner-operators and delivering them increasingly into
the control of professional, technically trained managers. An analo¬
gous transformation occurred in the state as political institutions
began to carry out social and economic functions that involved spe¬
cialized knowledge and skills that were quite beyond the capacities
of elected or hereditary officeholders to perform. In cultural insti¬
tutions also, educational institutions and later the media of mass
communication expanded dramatically in scale and in the number
and complexity of the functions they performed through their adap¬
tation of new technological processes and their transformation into
bureaucratic structures. In all of these social organizations in the
economy, the state, and the culture, there developed an at least latent
conflict of interest between, on the one hand, those trained in the
technical and managerial functions that enlarged organizational
scale demanded and, on the other, those who were not so trained
but who occupied positions of traditional leadership due to their
social status or their own personal talents and qualities of lead¬
ership. Members of the former group, the emerging elite, increas¬
ingly perceived their own interests as lying in the further enlarge¬
ment and further complexity of organization, while the latter, the
old or incumbent elites, increasingly saw their own power, eco¬
nomic resources, social status, and social codes as jeopardized by
the organizational and managerial revolutions and the rise of the
new class that benefited the most from these revolutions.

Yet the material forces that drove these revolutions in the forms of
new technologies and new kinds of bureaucratic organizations were
not sufficient in themselves to carry the emerging elites to social
dominance. Their emergence engendered resistance from older
elites that retained vested interests in older forms of organization —
in small-scale business firms owned and operated by the same indi¬
viduals in the form of family firms and partnerships; in parliamen¬
tary or congressional institutions and in local and state governments
that lacked the legal jurisdiction, fiscal resources, or physical scope
for enlargement on the same scale as the centralized, executive-
dominated state favored by the new elite; and in compact, locally
oriented schools, colleges, churches, newspapers, and other cul¬
tural institutions that served compact, largely homogeneous com-

Equality as a Political Weapon

213

munities of similar class, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. The per¬
sistence of such small, local, and personalized institutions served
not only to preserve the power of older elites but also represented a
barrier to the power of the newer elites lodged in large, bureaucrat¬
ically organized, and technologically expansive organizations.

The conflict between these two elites thus tended to assume an
ideological and political form as the newer elites sought the direct
aid of the state to dislodge their rivals and to displace them from
power, and the doctrine of egalitarianism was an essential compo¬
nent of their ideological struggle. It is hardly an accident that the
Progressive Movement flourished at the same time that the organiza¬
tional and managerial revolutions were occurring, for progressiv-
ism served as the main ideological vehicle by which the new elite
spawned by these revolutions rode to power and challenged the
power of the incumbent elites. It was the inculcation of progressiv-
ist premises and doctrines into American culture through the new
bureaucracies the emerging elites controlled that remains today the
main ideological support of the new elite’s power, and its hegemony
cannot be challenged until its ideological base is discredited and
broken up.

Egalitarianism played a central role in the progressivist ideologi¬
cal challenge, and the main form it assumed in the early twentieth
century was that of “environmentalism” — not in the contemporary
sense of concern for ecology but in the sense that human beings are
perceived as the products of their social and historical environment
rather than of their innate mental and physical natures. Egalitarian¬
ism was implicit in environmentalist ideology. If the natural or in¬
born traits of human beings are minimal or nonexistent and if the
differentiation among human beings according to class, race, sexu¬
ality, nationality, culture, etc. is rooted in social environments rather
than in nature, then human beings are conceptually reduced to a set
of identical reflexes and may be said to be “equal.” Taking Rous¬
seau’s famous sentence in The Social Contract, “Men are born free
but everywhere are in chains,” the environmentalist egalitarianism
of the Progressivists identified “freedom” as release from the “chains”
and a restoration of what they regarded as the natural equality that
existed before the chains were clapped on, and they identified the

214

Beautiful Losers

“chains” themselves as the institutional, intellectual, and moral fab¬
ric of bourgeois society as it was perceived in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.

Surveying what they took as the impending social and economic
chaos of the late nineteenth century — urban poverty, crime, dis¬
ease, racial conflict, and the dominance and exploitation of indus¬
trial wealth through monopoly — progressivist reformers articulated
a social and political theory that centered on environmentalist ex¬
planations of and solutions for these problems. “An environment
that had been made by human beings and could be changed by
human beings,” wrote Eric Goldman in an account of the ideas of
socialist Henry George, who exerted a profound influence on pro-
gressivism in the United States, “determined all men, institutions,
and ideas. . . . Legislating a better environment, particularly a bet¬
ter economic environment, could bring about a better world.”5

Environmentalist ideology was thus especially useful for progres¬
sivist reformers and their allies and sponsors in the emerging elites
in state and economy. On the one hand, environmentalism chal¬
lenged the institutions, ideas, and values of the older elites, arguing
that they were not “natural,” “normative,” or “necessary,” but merely
adaptations to specific historical circumstances and masks for the
continued preeminence of these elites. Laissez-faire economic the¬
ory, constitutionalism, doctrines of individual responsibility, the
bourgeois ethic of work, thrift, providence, and deferral of grati¬
fication, and the institutions and codes that enshrined these beliefs,
especially in the family, local community, and religion of traditional
society, in the environmentalist critique were not absolutes but rela¬
tive and could be overcome by those who understood them scien¬
tifically and had the administrative and political power to challenge
them. Progressivism, through its ideology of environmentalist egal¬
itarianism, rejected, called into question and, in Marxist parlance,
“demystified” and “delegitimized” not only the “excesses” of the
age — e.g., corruption and exploitation — but also the very founda¬
tions of the bourgeois order: its ethics, its religion, its law, and its
concept of government and sociopolitical relationships.

5. Eric F. Goldman. Rendezvous with Destiny : A History of Modern American
Reform, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1966), “’8.

Equality as a Political Weapon

215

Secondly, while environmentalism challenged the institutional
and ideological fabric of incumbent elites, it also offered a highly
convenient justification for the power of the rising elite. It was the
members of this new elite, skilled in the social and physical sciences
and their applications to the social and physical environment and in
the functions of bureaucratic organizations and administration, who
understood how to manipulate the environment for progressivist
ends. Granted the premises of environmentalist ideology, it was
logical that the emerging elites should be empowered to work their
will on social injustice and that older elites and the institutions and
ideas they favored should get out of their way.

Logically also, environmentalism as it was developed in progres¬
sivist thought was closely related to egalitarianism. The environ¬
mentalist argument is that there are no men, no sexes, no classes, no
races, and no social institutions that are inherently or by nature any
better than any other. Indeed, the whole thrust of environmental¬
ism is toward relativism, the denial of moral absolutes, and behav¬
iorism, the denial of an inherent human nature apart from minimal
physiological response mechanisms triggered by the external stim¬
uli of the environment, a position basic to Marxist social science as
well as to that of B. F. Skinner. And progressivist ideologues were
quick to draw these conclusions, at least when and where it suited
their ulterior purposes. They are found throughout the work of Franz
Boas and his studies of racial differences and in the similar work of
his disciples Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and in the latter
case at least have been shown to be entirely fraudulent. (And in all
cases unsupported by later, more serious scientific research). Since
apparent racial differences, in the doctrine of the Boas school, are
due to environmental rather than genetic or biological factors, it
followed that such differences can be removed by managing the
env ironment. In Boas’s view, “no group of human beings was more
or less advanced than the others. Their developments, coming about
in different environments, represented specializations in different
directions. . . . Culture was a cumulative evolutionary product, not
a function of racial heredity.”6

6. Ibid., 97.

216

Beautiful Losers

Environmentalist egalitarianism also informed the progressivist
critique of criminal law and penology, and its best known exponent
on the popular level was the famous shyster Clarence Darrow, who
was deeply influenced by Henry George and who devoted his life to
wrecking both the American criminal justice system and Aristo¬
telian logic. Environmentalism was fundamental to Darrow ’s lach¬
rymose defense of the child-murderers Nathan Leopold and Rich¬
ard Loeb in 1924, when he argued that a combination of the killers’
endocrine systems and their environment, not the killers themselves,
were responsible for the murder of Bobby Franks. Darrow argued it
would be cruel for the judge to sentence them to death, though it
does not seem to have occurred to him that their executioners could
equally claim to be merely the victims of their own environments.
In 1902, Darrow was somehow permitted to address the inmates at
Chicago’s Cook County Jail, telling the throng of felons that “there
is no such thing as crime as the word is generally understood. . . . If
every man, woman, and child in the world had a chance to make a
decent, fair, honest living, there would be no jails and no lawyers
and no courts.” Again, it never seemed to occur to Darrow that his
later clients, “Babe” Leopold and “Dicky” Loeb, were both the sons
of millionaires. After hearing his speech to the inmates, the warden
of the jail must have been in a quandary whether to throw Darrow
out or to lock him up. He clearly was too dangerous to be allowed to
run about loose, but equally he was perhaps too dangerous to lock
up with known criminals, and exposing the convicts to an endless
barrage of Darrow ’s drivel, even in the 1900s, would surely have
been cruel and unusual punishment.

On the formal level, the logical hop-scotch and forged research of
progressivist ideologues like Margaret Mead and Clarence Darrow
turn their environmentalist dogmas into clam chowder. But of course
their goal was not to discover truth but to wield power. Enveloping
their pseudoscience in a syrupy utopianism, the Progressives ap¬
pealed to moral sentiments, guilt, hope, fear, envy, and resentment
in delegitimizing traditional ideas and institutions and those whose
own power and status were connected to them, and in such epi¬
sodes as the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roo¬
sevelt, they and their heirs managed to get their hands on national
political power. Nor were environmentalist egalitarian ideas con-

Equality as a Political Weapon

217

fined to criminology and anthropology. They also informed the
progressivist views of economics, law in general, education, psy¬
chology, and sociology and thus formed the basis of progressivist
and liberal social policy for the bulk of the twentieth century. “It is
important to see,” wrote sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, “that the New
Deal’s efforts to change the economic and cultural environment,
largely through legislating greater equality of conditions between
classes of men, were a reflection of the whole intellectual climate of
opinion at the time. In almost every area of intellectual endeavor —
in the theories of crime, in law, in religion, and in the arts — there
was general agreement as to the sickness of bourgeois society and
the need for environmental reform.”7

Indeed, the ideological function of progressivism in delegitimiz-
ing bourgeois society was accomplished by its identification of the
society itself as the “environment” to be altered through social man¬
agement. Crime, as Darrow’s remarks imply, was a result of poverty
and dirty neighborhoods, which in turn were the products of eco¬
nomic inequality and could be rectified through redistribution of
wealth and the abandonment of classical economic theory in favor
of deliberate manipulation of the economy by the state to accom¬
plish social goals. Rights of property, traditionally grounded in cus¬
tomary and natural law, were delegitimized by the “sociological
jurisprudence” and “legal realism” of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ros-
coe Pound, and Louis Brandeis, among others, who portrayed law
as merely the codification of the interests of the bourgeois elite.
“Laws, institutions and systems of government,” wrote progressiv¬
ist political scientist J. Allen Smith in The Spirit of American Gov¬
ernment in 1907, “are in a sense artificial creations, and must be
judged in relation to the ends which they have in view. They are
good or bad according as they are well or poorly adapted to social
needs.”8 In itself, this sentiment is largely unobjectionable, but the
context in which it and similar such bromides were trumpeted forth
by Smith and his progressivist colleagues was to wield it against the
legitimacy of the Constitution and the traditional forms of American

7. E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in
America (New York: Random House, 1964), 27 1 .

8. Quoted in Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 113-

218

Beautiful Losers

government and law. Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of
the Constitution (1913) similarly depicted the Constitution itself as
the product of the economic interests of the Framers, and Frederick
Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” offered an environmentalist expla¬
nation for American history. Federalism, the dispersion of political
power through the balance of local and central authority, was re¬
garded by the Progressives as a device by which a bourgeois elite
controlled and limited centralized government and prevented the
state from intruding on their private and local power centers. The
family, a special target of behaviorist psychologist John B. Watson,
was depicted as the source of neurosis, social conflict, and malad¬
justment, and behaviorism became an important ideological instru¬
ment by which managerial corporations disciplined their workers
and the consumers of their products. Edward Bernays, a nephew of
Sigmund Freud, also helped develop behaviorist psychological tech¬
niques for the managed economy in the science of “public rela¬
tions,” which he helped found. “Treating all people as mechanically
identical,” writes historian Stuart Ewen, Bernays “called for the
implementation of a ‘mass psychology’ by which public opinion
might be controlled.”9 Environmentalist egalitarianism became im¬
bedded in the very structure through which the elite exercised
power. The new technologies and organizational forms that the new
elite controlled allowed for the envelopment of larger and larger
numbers of people by governments, corporations, and mass media,
but only if the unequal differentiations among people were broken
down and homogenized. The reliance on egalitarianism by the mod¬
ern bureaucratic state is relatively clear. Universal suffrage and equal¬
ity of rights are created and rigorously enforced by the state, and the
mass electorate becomes a perpetual horn of plenty from which the
bureaucratic elite of the state can continuously accumulate new
power. The enlargement of the central state reduces the diversified
authority of state and local jurisdictions, and through judicial expan¬
sion of the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
the agents of enhanced federal power have used the Constitution

9 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of
the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976), 83-

Equality as a Political Weapon

219

itself as a hammer by which private, social, and local impediments
to equality can be broken down.

But equality is no less useful for large corporations, which require
a nationally homogenized market of consumers that can be manipu¬
lated into buying their products and which find abhorrent and dys¬
functional the persistence of local variations in their markets caused
by smaller, localized competitors or class, ethnic, and regional di¬
versities of taste and demand. Only if such variations and diversities
are broken up and homogenized by the inculcation of an egalitarian
ethic of universal consumption, immediate gratification through
credit, and upward social and economic mobility and a uniform
range of wants can large corporate enterprises operate on a national
(and now a global) scale. It is thus basic to the interests of the large
corporation to erode social and cultural diversity and promote egali¬
tarian uniformity, as well as to cooperate with and support political
egalitarianism, the costs of which in increased unionization, protec¬
tion of the labor force, regulation, civil rights legislation, and eco¬
logical environmentalism, are ruinous to the smaller competitors of
the corporations but much less harmful to those larger economies
that can absorb such costs and pass them on to consumers. Simi¬
larly, the mass media organizations that dominate culture cannot
effectively communicate with and propagandize a mass audience
unless the ideas and tastes of the audience are homogeneous, and
the homogenization of ideas and taste must be paralleled by the
homogenization and levelling of the social institutions that breed
inequality and diversity. The contemporary power structure of late
twentieth-century America, therefore, in government, economy,
and culture is in large part based on an egalitarian ethic, one that
starts from the premises that human beings are fundamentally iden¬
tical, that variations and inequalities among them are due to an arti¬
ficial environment, and that that environment can be molded, ma¬
nipulated, and reconstructed to make of men what you will.

If the progressivism of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen¬
turies had been merely the maunderings of malcontents like Clar¬
ence Darrow and frauds like Margaret Mead or even if it had simply
been the ideology of convenience for a few politicians like Wilson
and Roosevelt and their cronies, its legacy would have long since
passed. But the historical significance of progressivism and its doc-

220

Beautiful Losers

trine of environmentalist egalitarianism is, as I have argued, that it
represented an ideological blunt instrument by which an emerging
elite battered its way to cultural as well as economic and political
power, an elite that was specially equipped to apply scientific (and
pseudoscientific) ideas and techniques to social, economic, and
political arrangements and to do so through its control of the bu¬
reaucracies of the state, corporations, labor unions, universities,
foundations, and mass media. As an elite, it was able to straddle and
transcend specific political parties, administrations, and person¬
alities and to infect almost the whole of American culture with its
revolutionary ideological norm of environmentalist egalitarianism.
That norm did not triumph or flourish because of its intrinsic merits
or because most Americans were rationally persuaded of it or because
the intellectuals and politicians who preached it really believed it,
let alone really practiced it in their own lives, but because it offered
opportunities for some to gain power at the expense of others, be¬
cause it was able to serve as a convenient political weapon.

Today, in such movements as “multiculturalism” and “Afrocen-
trism” in schools and universities and in reliance on “therapy” cur¬
ricula in the form of “sensitivity training” and “human relations”
courses, we are witnessing what many consider the reductio ad
absurdum of progressivist egalitarianism. Yet it is not really a re¬
duction to absurdity but merely another twist of the egalitarian dag¬
ger. Progressives such as Boas and Darrow never heard of the Italian
Communist Antonio Gramsci, but what they argued about the “en¬
vironment” of bourgeois society in nineteenth-century America is
not fundamentally different from Gramsci’s argument about “cul¬
tural hegemony” — that elites rule through their dominance of cul¬
ture more than through their control of the means of production
and that revolutionaries who seek to overthrow an elite must first
make a long march through the institutions of culture before trying
to wield political or economic power. It is Gramsci’s doctrine that is
being put into practice today. From the chant “Western culture’s got
to go” at Stanford a few years ago to the tax-funded perversions of
Robert Mapplethorpe to the claims that Beethoven and Cleopatra
were really Africans, the argument is that “Western,” heterosexual,
and Caucasian institutions and beliefs are corruptive, repressive,
and exploitative encrustations of a hegemonic environment that,

Equality as a Political Weapon

221

when scraped away by egalitarian social (and now psychic) engi¬
neering, will yield the same kind of egalitarian utopia the Progres¬
sives envisioned. Only the specific targets have changed, and indeed
the targets have always changed throughout the history of the Left,
as each new utopia turns out to be fake. In the Enlightenment and in
much of classical liberalism, the target was the state — the estab¬
lished churches, aristocracies, guilds, and dynasties of the eighteenth
century. When liberation from these political “chains” failed to bring
about the promised land, the target became the economy — private
property, classical economics, and the distribution of wealth — and
it was mainly an economic target that the Progressives had in their
sights. In the twentieth century, the target shifted yet again to social
and cultural environment — the family, the school, religion, social
class, and race as a social phenomenon. Eventually, we can predict,
egalitarians will discover — and indeed now are discovering — that
nature itself is the source of inequality, at which point they will have
come full circle and find themselves in agreement with Dr. Fleming
and Dr. Goldberg.

But it won’t make any difference. Whether egalitarians, recogniz¬
ing at last that inequality is ultimately rooted in man’s nature, accept
that lesson, or whether, through genetic engineering and state-funded
lobotomies, they launch yet another revolt against inequality and
against nature itself will depend less on who and how many really
believe in the egalitarian lie than on who stands to gain from wield¬
ing the egalitarian sword.

Beautiful Losers

The Failure of American Conservatism

When T. S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are
no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conser¬
vatism. Nearly sixty years after the New Deal, the American Right is
no closer to challenging its fundamental premises and machinery
than when Old Rubberlegs first started priming the pump and schem¬
ing to take the United States into a war that turned out to be a social
and political revolution. American conservatism, in other words, is
a failure, and all the think tanks, magazines, direct-mail barons,
inaugural balls, and campaign buttons cannot disguise or alter it.
Virtually every cause to which conservatives have attached them¬
selves for the past three generations has been lost, and the tide of
political and cultural battle is not likely to turn anytime soon.

Not only has the American Right lost on such fundamental issues
as the fusion of state and economy, the size and scope of govern¬
ment, the globalist course of American foreign policy, the transfor¬
mation of the Constitution into a meaningless document that serves
the special interests of whatever faction can grab it for a while, and
the replacement of what is generally called “traditional morality”
by a dominant ethic of instant gratification, but also the mainstream
of those who today are pleased to call themselves conservatives has
come to accept at least the premises and often the full-blown agenda
of the Left. The movement that came to be known in the 1970s as
neoconservatism, largely northeastern, urban, and academic in its
orientation, is now the defining core of the “permissible” Right —
that is, what a dominant Left-liberal cultural and political elite rec¬
ognizes and accepts as the Right boundary of public discourse. It
remains legally possible (barely) to express sentiments and ideas
that are further to the Right, but if an elite enjoys cultural hege¬
mony. as the Left does, it has no real reason to outlaw its opponents.
Indeed, encouraging their participation in the debate fosters the
illusion of “pluralism” and serves to legitimize the main Leftward
trend of the debate. Those outside the permissible boundaries of

222

Beautiful Losers

223

discourse are simply "denationalized” and ignored — as anti-Sem¬
ites, racists, authoritarians, crackpots, crooks, or simply as "nostal¬
gic,” and other kinds of illicit and irrational fringe elements not in
harmonic convergence with the Zeitgeist and therefore on the wrong
side of history. That is where the de facto alliance of Left and neo¬
conservative Right has succeeded in relegating those who dissent
from their common core of shared premises such as journalist
Patrick J. Buchanan and anyone else who seriously and repeatedly
challenges their hegemony.

“Neoconservatism” today is usually called simply “conservatism,”
though it is sometimes known under other labels as well: Fred Barnes’s
"Big Government conservatism”; HUD Secretary Jack Kemp’s "pro¬
gressive conservatism”; Representative Newt Gingrich’s “opportun¬
ity conservatism”; Paul Weyrich’s “cultural conservatism”; or, most
recently, "The New Paradigm,” in the phrase coined by White House
aide James Pinkerton. Despite the variations among these formulas,
all of them envision a far larger and more active central state than
the "Old Republicanism” embraced by most conservatives prior to
the 1970s, a state that makes it its business to envision a particular
arrangement of institutions and beliefs and to design governmental
machinery to create them. In the case of "neoconservatism,” the
principal goal is the enhancement of economic opportunity through
one kind or another of social engineering (enterprise zones, for
example) and the establishment of an ethic that regards equality
(usually disguised as “equality of opportunity”), economic mobil¬
ity, affluence, and material gratification as the central meaning of
what their exponents often call "the American experiment.”

Such goals are not conceptually distinct from those of the pro-
gressivism and liberalism athwart which the American Right at one
time promised to stand, though the tactics and procedures by which
they are to be achieved are somewhat (but not very) different. Indeed,
much of what neoconservatives are concerned with is merely pro¬
cess — strategy, tactics, how to win elections, how to broaden the
base of the GOP, how to make the government run more effectively,
how to achieve "credibility” and exert an "impact” — and not with
the ultimate goals themselves, about which there is little debate with
those parts of the Left that also lie within the permissible range of
“pluralistic” dialogue. Given the persistent cultural dominance of

224

Beautiful Losers

the Left, a conservatism that limits itself merely to procedural prob¬
lems tacitly concedes the goals of public action to its enemies and
quietly comes to share the premises on which the goals of the Left
rest. Eventually, having silently and unconsciously accepted the
premises and goals, it will also come to accept even the means by
which the Left has secured its dominance, and the very distinction
between “Right” and “Left” will disappear.

It was this kind of silent acquiescence in the premises of the Left
that James Burnham identified as a salient characteristic of neocon¬
servatism when it first began to appear in the early 1970s. In an
exchange with neoconserv ative Peter Berger in National Review
(May 12, 1972), Burnham noted that though neoconservatives had
broken with “liberal doctrine,” finding it “both intellectually bank¬
rupt and, by and large, pragmatically sterile,” they retained “what
might be called the emotional gestalt of liberalism, the liberal sen¬
sitivity and temperament,” the ideoneurological reflexes and knee-
jerks of the Left. Since that time, those reflexes have not only not
been recircuited but have been reinforced, so that today the neo¬
conservative “Right” almost explicitly accepts and defends the New
Deal and its legacy, seeking only to spruce them up and administer
them more effectively and more honestly, but not to reverse them or
transcend them — Old Right goals routinely dismissed by the neo¬
conservative Right as “impractical.”

But Burnham also remarked that “much of conserv ative doctrine
. . . also is, if not quite bankrupt, more and more obsolescent,” and
the failure of conservatism and its eventual displacement by neo¬
conservative formulas is closely related to its bankruptcy. The sur¬
vivors of the Old Right today spend a good deal of their time com¬
plaining about their dethronement by pseudoconservatives, but
those Old Rightists who survive are only the hardiest of the species,
ever vigilant for camouflaged predators who slip into their herds.
For the most part, their predecessors in the conservative movement
of the 1950s and 1960s were not so careful, and indeed many of
them failed to understand the ideological dynamics of liberalism,
how the liberal regime functioned, or how to distinguish and insu¬
late their own beliefs and organizations against the Left. That error
was perhaps at least part of what Burnham meant by the “obsoles¬
cence” of conservatism. It was an error that was the principal weak-

Beautiful Losers

225

ness of conservatism and permitted the eventual triumph of neo¬
conservative forces and the assimilation of the Right within the
dominant cultural apparatus that serves the Left’s interests.

The Old Right, composed mainly of the organized conservative
resistance formed in the mid-1950s and centered around National
Review , failed to understand that the revolution had already oc¬
curred. Conventional Old Right doctrines revolved around the ideas
of a constitutionally limited central government, largely indepen¬
dent local and state government, an entrepreneurial economy of
privately owned and operated firms, and a moral and social code of
restrained or “ascetic” individualism in politics, economy, art, reli¬
gion, and ethics. These doctrines reflected the institutions and be¬
liefs of the bourgeois elite that had gained political power in the
Civil War and prevailed until the dislocations of twentieth-century
technological and organizational expansion brought forth a new
managerial elite that seized power in the reforms of the Progressive
Era and the New Deal. These reforms constituted the revolution, not
only in the political power of Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and the
Democratic party but also in the construction of an entire architec¬
ture of economic and cultural power, based on bureaucratized cor¬
porations and unions, increasingly bureaucratized universities, foun¬
dations, churches, and mass media, and fused, directly or indirectly,
with a centralized bureaucratic state. Since the revolution occurred
legally and peacefully and assimilated traditional institutions and
symbols to its use, it was not immediately apparent that it had taken
place at all, that the dominant minority in the United States had
circulated, that the bourgeois elite no longer called the shots, or that
those who continued to adhere to Old Right doctrines were no longer
in a position to “conserve” much of anything. But while the Old
Right of the 1950s was in principle aware and critical of the new
power structure, it continued to regard itself as essentially “conser¬
vative” of an established or traditional order rather than frankly
acknowledging that it had been dethroned and that a counterrevolu¬
tionary mission, not “conserving,” was its mission, its proper strategy.

Hence, the entire strategy of the Old Right of the 1950s was to
seek accommodation with the new managerial-bureaucratic estab¬
lishment rather than to challenge it. George H. Nash writes that
William F. Buckley, Jr.,

226

Beautiful Losers

forcefully rejected what he called “the popular and cliche-ridden appeal to
the grass-roots” and strove instead to establish a journal which would reach
intellectuals. Not all conservatives agreed with this approach, but the young
editor-to-be was firm. It was the intellectuals, after all, “who have midwived
and implemented the revolution. We have got to have allies among the intel¬
lectuals, and we propose to renovate conservatism and see if we can’t win
some of them around.”

Yet while Buckley seemed cognizant of the “revolution” that had
transpired and was, in fact, successful in attracting a number of in¬
tellectuals, he failed to see that the new intellectual class as a whole,
which had indeed “midwived and implemented the revolution,”
could not become conservative. It could not do so because its prin¬
cipal interest, social function, and occupational calling in the new
order was to delegitimize the ideas and institutions of conserva¬
tism and provide legitimization for the new regime, and its power
and rewards as a class depended upon the very bureaucratized cul¬
tural organizations that conservatives attacked. Only if conserva¬
tism were “renovated” to the point that it no longer rejected the
cultural apparatus of the revolution could intellectuals be expected
to sign up.

Moreover, by focusing its efforts in Manhattan, Washington, and
the major centers of the intelligentsia and other sectors of the new
elite, Buckley and his conservative colleagues isolated themselves
from their natural allies in the “grass roots.” While there was clearly
a need for intellectual sophistication on the Right, the result of Buck¬
ley’s tactic was to generate a schism between Old Right intellectual
cadres and the body of conservative supporters outside its north¬
eastern urban and academic headquarters. Among these supporters
in the 1950s and 1960s there flourished an increasingly bizarre and
deracinated wilderness of extremist, conspiratorialist, racialist, and
even occultist ideologues who loudly rejected both the Old Right
mainstream and the Old Right’s new friends in the intellectual and
cultural elite, but who failed to attract any but the most marginal
and pathological elements in the country and exerted no cultural or
political influence at all. At various times in its history, National
Review has found it necessary to “purge” itself of such adherents,
and each catharsis, no matter how prudent, has rendered its “reno¬
vated” conservatism less and less palatable to ordinary Americans

Beautiful Losers

227

and more and more acceptable to the Manhattanite intelligentsia it
has always sought to attract.

In any case, the Old Right intellectuals for the most part had few
links with the “grass roots,” the popular, middle-class, and W\SP
nucleus of traditional American culture. National Review itself was
not only Manhattanite but also Ivy League and Roman Catholic in its
orientation, as well as ex-communist and ethnic in its editorial com¬
position, and not a few of its brightest stars in the 1950s were per¬
sonally eccentric, if not outright neurotic. Moreover, few of them
reflected the “Protestant Establishment” that, by the end of World
War II, had largely made its peace with the new regime and was
scurrying to secure its own future within the managerial state, econ¬
omy, and culture. Of the twenty-five conservative intellectuals whose
photographs appeared on the dust jacket of George H. Nash’s The
Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 , pub¬
lished in 1976, four are Roman Catholic, seven are Jewish, another
seven (including three Jews) are foreign-born, two are southern or
western in origin, and only five are in any respect representative of
the historically dominant Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Celtic)
Protestant strain in American history and culture (three of the five
later converted to Roman Catholicism). Theological meditation com¬
peted with free-market economic theory as the main interest of
many Old Right intellectuals to a far larger degree than had been the
case with such pre-World War II skeptics of progressivism as Albert
Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, or the “America First” opponents of for¬
eign intervention.

The religious, ideological, and ethnic differentiation of the Old
Right from the country’s Protestant Establishment may have helped
push its leaders in a more radical direction than they were inclined
to go, but it probably also served to cut them off from both the
Establishment’s declining leadership and from the rank and file of
Americans outside it. The Old Right could not help but remain an
isolated circle of intellectuals and journalists, absorbed in rather
esoteric theory, despised by the intellectual elite they hoped to im¬
press and convert, and ignored by most Americans and their politi¬
cal leaders.

The Old Right’s political aspirations were no less grotesque than
its desire to win acceptance among the intellectuals and followed

228

Beautiful Losers

much the same strategy. Although the remnants of the bourgeois
elite retained an important political base in congressional districts
remote from the centers of the new regime, they could serve only as
a brake on the regime’s power and were unable to control either
Congress or the presidency. Their inability to do so was directly
related to conservatives’ lack of cultural power, their lack of contact
with and their not-infrequent contempt for Americans outside the
circles of the national elite. Even when Old Right forces were able to
capture the Republican party in 1964, the disastrous result of Barry
Goldwater’s candidacy was in large part due to his supporters’ lack
of access to the national organs of culture and opinion. Subsequent
Old Right political efforts concentrated on attempts to gain influ¬
ence within the political domain of the elite by means of endless
searches for suitable presidential candidates who could seize na¬
tional power at a single blow and through a kind of Fabian tactic of
permeating the federal bureaucracy. As a result, there has now emerged
an entire generation of what might be called “Court Conservatives”
who devote their careers to place-seeking in the federal government
and favor-currying with whatever president or satrap is able to hire
them and who have long since abandoned any serious intention of
challenging the bureaucratic organism they have infected with their
presence.

In the absence of a significant cultural base, such political efforts
not only were bound to fail but also had the effect of drawing the
Right further into the institutional and conceptual framework of the
liberal regime. Political maneuver by its nature is a process of bar¬
gaining, and the more conservatives have engaged in political action,
the more they have found themselves bargaining and compromising
with their opponents, who often do not need to bargain at all. Since
their opponents on the Left, in Congress or the executive branch,
have ready access to and sympathy with the mass media, they are
able to discredit the men and measures of the Right that will not
bend to their manipulation. Moreover, the Right’s preoccupation
with the presidency also forces it to seek acceptance by the national
media and the dominant culture of the Left and focuses its efforts on
an institution that is far less susceptible to grass roots influence than
Congress. The modern presidency, as the lesson of the hapless Rea¬
gan Administration shows, is less the master of the bureaucratic elite

Beautiful Losers

229

than its servant, and while a powerful president could subdue and
circumvent his own bureaucracy, he could do so consistently only if
he were able and willing to mobilize mass support against it from
outside the elite.

The political weakness of the Old Right and its failure to under¬
stand that it really represented a subordinate and displaced elite
rather than a dominant incumbent one were instrumental in its grad¬
ual assimilation by the liberal regime. The crucial episode in the
assimilation occurred during the Vietnam War, which the Old Right
in general supported on the grounds of anticommunism. The war
itself was a result of misconceived liberal policies and was effec¬
tively lost by liberal mismanagement, and there was no good reason
for the Right (even the anticommunist Right) to support it. Yet, as
the New Left mounted an attack on the war and broadened the at¬
tack to include the bureaucratized university and parts of the levia¬
than state, the Right’s response was to defend not only the war and
sometimes even the liberal policies that were losing it, but also the
liberal power centers themselves. The Old Right critique of contain¬
ment, mounted by anti-interventionists such as Robert Taft and John
T. Flynn and by anticommunist interventionists such as Burnham,
was forgotten, as was much of the Old Right cultural critique of the
domestic liberal regime, which mirrored its globalist regime. It was
at this point that the Old Right began to join forces with emerging
neoconservative elements, whose concern was entirely with de¬
fending the liberal managerial system, foreign and domestic, and
which never had the slightest interest in dismantling it. The result
of the coalition between Old Right and neoconservatism has been
the adoption by the Right of Wilsonian-Rooseveltian globalism and
its universalist premises, the diffusion of those premises within the
Right in defense of what are actually the institutions and goals of the
Left, and the gradual abandonment of the Old Right goals of reduc¬
ing the size and scope of centralized power. By swallowing the prem¬
ises of the Left’s globalist and messianic foreign policy, the Right has
wound up regurgitating those same premises domestically. If it is
our mission to build democracy and protect human rights in Af¬
ghanistan, then why should we not also enforce civil rights in Mis¬
sissippi and break down the barriers to equality of opportunity
everywhere through the sledgehammer of federal power? Conser-

230

Beautiful Losers

vatives do not yet advocate sending the Special Forces into Ben-
sonhurst and Howard Beach, but the story is not over yet.

To say that the conservatism of the Old Right failed is not to dis¬
miss the important contributions its exponents made to a critical
analysis of liberal ideology or all of its work in political theory,
international relations, economic and social policy, and religious,
philosophical, and cultural thought. The Old Right intelligentsia as
a whole was a far more exciting group of thinkers and writers than
the post- World War II Left produced. Nor does pointing to its failure
mean that a serious Right was not or is not possible. It is merely to
say that the Old Right fundamentally misperceived its own position
in and relationship to the emerging managerial regime and that this
misperception led it into a mistaken strategy of seeking consensus
rather than conflict with the dominant elite of the regime.

It remains possible today to rectify that error by a radical altera¬
tion of the Right’s strategy. Abandoning the illusion that it repre¬
sents an establishment to be “conserved,” a new American Right
must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the
establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale,
and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened
strata of Middle America. The strategy of the Right should be to
enhance the polarization of Middle Americans from the incumbent
regime, not to build coalitions with the regime’s defenders and ben¬
eficiaries. Moreover, since “Middle America” consists of workers,
farmers, suburbanites and other non- or postbourgeois groups, as
well as small businessmen, it is unlikely that a new Right will make
much progress in mobilizing them if it simply repeats the ideologi¬
cal formulas of a now long-defunct bourgeois elite and its order.
The more salient concerns of postbourgeois Middle Americans that
a new Right can express are those of crime, educational collapse, the
erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of
their social, cultural, and national identity by forces that serve the
interests of the elite above them and the underclass below them, but
at the expense of the middle class. A new Right, positioning itself in
opposition to the elite and the elite’s underclass ally, can assert its
leadership of alienated Middle Americans and mobilize them in rad¬
ical opposition to the regime.

A new, radical Middle American Right need not abandon political

Beautiful Losers

231

efforts, but, consistent with its recognition that it is laying siege to a
hostile establishment, it ought to realize that political action in a cul¬
tural power vacuum will be largely futile. The main focus of a Mid¬
dle American Right should be the reclamation of cultural power, the
patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the
regime — within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it. Instead
of the uselessness of a Diogenes’ search for an honest presidential
candidate or a Fabian quest for a career in the bureaucracy, a Middle
American Right should begin working in and with schools, churches,
clubs, women’s groups, youth organizations, civic and professional
associations, local government, the military and police forces, and
even in the much-dreaded labor unions to create a radicalized Mid¬
dle American consciousness that can perceive the ways in which
exploitation of the middle classes is institutionalized and under¬
stand how it can be resisted. Only when this kind of infrastructure
of cultural hegemony is developed can a Middle American Right
seek meaningful political power without coalitions with the Left
and bargaining with the regime.

Eliot may have been right that no cause is really lost because none
is really won, but victory and defeat in the struggle for social domi¬
nance have little to do with whether the cause is right or wrong.
Some ideas have more consequences than others, and those that
attach themselves to declining social and political forces have the
least consequences of all. By allowing itself to be assimilated by the
regime of the Left, American conservatism became part of a social
and political force that, if not on the decline, is at least confronted
by a rising force that seeks to displace it, even as the regime of the
Left displaced its predecessor. If the American Right can disengage
from the Left and its regime, it can assume leadership of a cause that
could be right as well as victorious. But it can do so only if it has the
wit and the will to disabuse itself of the illusions that have distracted
it almost since its birth.

Index

Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 183
Adams, John Quincy, 5 1
Alliance for Progress, 22
America, 4, 6, 19-29, 31-34, 36, 39, 4 1 ,
43, 84-85, 88-90, 9 1 , 92, 93, 120, 153,
156, 158, 161, 170, 186, 200, 201,

205, 206, 219, 220, 22", 230
Americans, 17, 18, 20-22, 24-26, 28, 30,
34, 41, 84-86, 1 18, U2, 152, 194, 200,
201, 220, 226-28, 230
American Spectator, 1 16
American system, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50
Ayer, A.J., 134

Baltzell, E. Digby, 217
Barnes, Fred, 13, 223
Beard, Charles, 218
Bell, Daniel, 105, 106, 1 1 1
Benedict, Ruth, 139, 215
Bennett, William, 14, 116
Berger, Peter, 94, 224
Berger, Raoul, 16"7
Bernays, Edward, 218
Berns, Walter, 164, 167
Bickel, Alexander, 167
Billington, James, 136
Bismarck, Otto von, 1 22
Blumenthal, Sidney, 185
Boas, Franz, 215, 220
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 38, 67, 1 13
Boorstin, Daniel, 105
Bork, Robert, 161, 162
Bourgeois, 11-13,89-94,97-102, 104-6,
108, 109, 112, 115, 11", 121, 131,

135, 202-4, 206, 211,214, 21", 218.
220, 225, 228, 230
Bradford, M. E., 14, 116, 176,208
Brandeis, Louis, 217
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 168
Buchanan, Patrick J., 9, 14, 118, 223
Buckley, W illiam F., Jr., 60, 79, 1 18, 172,
191. 195-99, 225, 226
Bureaucracy, 13, 31- 64-65, 75-77, 82,
85, 102, 103, 128, 142, 143, 172-74.
203, 211. 228, 229, 231

Burger, Warren. 161
Burke, Edmund, 47, 64, 121, 134, 177,
178

Burnham, James, 2-4. 11, 15, 16, 68, 79,
83,86,92,94,96, 101, 1 14, 129, 130,
132-38, 168, 172, 173, 177, 195, 196,
198, 202, 224, 229
Bush, George, 6, 10, 11, 16, 172

Caesar, Julius, 67

Caesarism, 10-11, 49, 67, 75-76, 173
Calhoun, John C., 36, 5 1 , 53, 54
Campanis, Al, 153

Capitalism, 28, 89, 90, 92, 101, 103, 104,
112-14, 123, 173, 178, 196, 197, 201,
203

Carey, George W„ 83, 208
Carter, Jimmy, 8, 25, 26, 164
Chambers, Whittaker, 4, 15, 86, 93, 100,
136, 137, 143, 144, 148, 177, 191,
192-98

Civil Rights Acts, 124
Civil W^ar, 57, 91, 157, 203, 225
Clay, Henry, 1. 35-59
Collins, Karen, 153, 154
Communism, 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, 16,73,77,
88,89, 105, 113, 129, 137, 139-44,
147-51, 169, 17", 191-97,229
Congress, IJ.S., 10, 13, 35, 3~\ 40, 54, 67,
75,84,85, 100, 125, 135, 152, 153,
155, 160-68, 170-74, 183, 184,202,
228

Conservatism, 1-4,7, 11-14, 18, 4", 71,
79-83, 86-89, 91-93. 95, 96, 100-105,
107. 1 10-14, 1 16-22, 124, 126, 12".
128, 130, 13", 149, 168, 169, 1"4, 1"6,
177, 1 "8, 180, 190, 195. 196, 203.

204, 222-26, 229-31
Constitution, U.S., 28, 40, 52, 53, 58. 80,
125. 157-59, 161. 162, 164, 165-6",
169. 182, 187, 188, 21", 218. 222
Cosmopolitan ethic, 64, 66, 73. "4, •

99

Cosmopolitanism, 66, 74, 76, 109

Croly, Herbert, 205

233

234

Index

Dahrendorf, Rail, 133, 13*7

Harrow, Clarence, 216, 217, 219, 220

Davis, Jefferson, 55

Declaration of Independence, 82, 83,

156, 186

Democracy, 6, 7, 18, 20-22, 24, 28, 34,
91, 102, HP, 1 1 1, 1 13, 120. 150, 158,
163, 168, 178, 181-86, 188, 189, 190,
229

Democratic party, 101. 225
Democratism, 6, 7, 113
Determinism, 3
Diderot, Denis, 90
Disraeli, Benjamin, 122
Domestic Ethic, 74
Domhoff, G. William, 69
Douglas, Stephen A., 55, 56
Duke, David, 9, 205

East, John R, PI
Edwards, Mickey. P0-72
Efron, Edith, 130

Egalitarianism, 59, "4, 82, 83, 208-2 1
See (i Iso Equality
Einstein, Albert, 96, 192
Eliot. T. S., 181, 222, 231
Elites, 3,9, 11. 65-67, 72, 73, 92, 97-99,
106, 1 1 4 , 124, 1 2“\ 168, 186, 202,
211-15, 220

Enlightenment, 90, 143, 194, 210, 221
Environmentalism, 213-16, 219

Equality, 63, 82, 83, 102, 108. 186,

1 8"\ 208-21, 223, 229. See also
Egalitarianism
Ewen, Stuart, 218

Ferguson, Adam, 90
Fleming, Thomas, 208, 221
Flynn, John T., 229
Forbes, Malcolm, 200
Foreign policy, 5,6,8, 10. 11, 13, 15-17,
19-26, 28-34, 67, 72, ”3, 75, 7“'. 1 12.

1 13, 162, 163, 165-^2, P4. 183, 186-
88, 203, 222, 229
Fossedal, Gregory A., 6, 7, 181-90
Franco, Francisco, 183
Friedman, Milton, ' 1 . Ill
Frostbelt, 31,71

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 60, 104, 114
George, Henry, 214, 216
Gingrich, Newt, 160, 223

Glazer, Nathan, 105. 106, 1 1 1
Globalism, 7, 11, 17,24, 106, 169,229
Goldberg, Steven, 208, 221
Goldman, Eric, 103, 107,214
Goldwater, Barry, 60, 101, 105, 148, 1 63,
164. 170, 203, 228
Gramsci, Antonio, 220
Great Britain, 3"7-40, 42, 182, 188, 195
Great Society, 16,89,91, 104, 110, 1 15,
205

Greenwood, Grace, 35, 58

Hamilton, Alexander, 166
Harding, Vincent, 155, 160
Harrison, William Henry, 36
Hart, Jeffrey, "5
Hartz, Louis, 105

Hayek, F. A., 2, 71, 111, 178, 188, 189

Helms, Jesse, 164, 171

Hiss, Alger, 139, 140, 142, 146, 191-93

Hitler, Adolf, 206

Hobbes, Thomas, 120, 133

Hofstadter, Richard, 105, 106, 108

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 157, 2 17

Hook, Sidney, 1 49, 178

Hoover, Herbert, 60

Houston, Sam, 5 1

Hume, David, 90, 136, 166

Humphrey, Hubert H„ 105, 111, 171

Isolationism, 5, 7, 26, 72, 77

Jackson- Vanik Amendment, l"7 1
Jackson, Andrew, 36, 45, 46, 48, 49, 5 1
Jackson, Henry, 1 1 1
Jackson, Jesse, 159, 167,205,207
Jefferson, Thomas, 55, 158
John Randolph Club, 14, 15n
Johnson, Lyndon, B., 8, 85, 104, 105,

1 11, 149, 150, 17"7, 206
Joyce, James, 192

Kemp, Jack, 160, 223
Kendall, Willmoore, 15,79-87, 101, 168,
177, 208

Kennedy, John F., 24, 84, 85, 104, 149
Kenyatta, Muhammed, 154
Kilpatrick, James J., 1 18
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 17, 148, 152-60,
166

Kirk, Russell, 79,91, 121, 131, 168, 170,
178, 195

Index

235

Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 1 1 1
Kissinger, Henry, 2-4-25
Kristol, Irving, 12, 68, 88-95, 110, 111,
113, 1 14

Kuttner, Robert, 206

Laffer, Arthur, 7 1
Lattimore, Owen, 14""

Lee, Robert E., 30, 144, 145
Leopold and Loeb case, 2 16
Liberalism, 12, 13, 28, 58, 63-66, 76, 79,
82, 83, 85-89, 93, 94, 95, 98, 100-11,

1 13-15, 120, 122-24, 126, 128, 132,
142, 143, 148-51, 168, 177, 180, 188,
189, 194, 195, 203, 221, 223, 224
Libertarianism, 137

Lincoln, Abraham, 14, 59, 84, 158, 164,
201

Lipset, Seymour Martin, 105, 106, 111

Locke, John, 164-66

Louis XIV, 67

Louisiana Purchase, 53

Lukacs, John, 206

McCarthy, Joseph R., 1, 15, 16, 101, 105,
1 3"C 139-42, 144-51, 16"', 195
McClellan, James A., 1"0
McDonald, Forrest, 166
Machiavelli, Niccolb, 4, 1 19, 120,

132-34, 136

Madison, James, 37, 56, 119, 136, 161,

1 "8

Malraux, Andre, 134
Managerial elite, 1 1, 13, 16, 67-"2, 74,
"'5, "7‘7, ^8, 101-3, 105, 106, 109, 114,
1 16, 135, 168, 202, 225
Managerial revolution, 2, 12, 13, 15-17,
92, 95, 96, 100, 101, 1 15, 1 17, 132,
13”, 172, 1"3, 202
Manifest Destiny, 40, 53
Mapplethorpe, Robert. 220
Markvvard, Mary Staleup, 144-46
Marshall, George (7, 1 4 0
Marshall, Thurgood, 158
Marshall Plan, 22
Mead, Margaret, 215, 216, 219
Mencken, H L„ 22"

Mexican War, 36, 49, 50
Meyer, Frank S., 2, 8 1 , 101, 121, 130,
168, 1”, 195

Middle American Radicals (MARs), 8-11.
60-62, 68, 69, 73, T4, 77, ^8

Middle American Right, 230, 23 1
Middle class, 62, 66, 99, 109, 201 . 202,
205, 230

Mill, John Stuart, 132
Millenarianism, 5, 6-8, 17, 21, 23-29, 32,
1 56

Mills, C. Wright, 137, 173
Mises, Ludwig von, 2, 7 1 , 195
Modernity, 119, 127, 131, 193
Monroe, James, 45

Montesquieu, Baron de, Charles Seeondat,
17, 136, 166

Mosca, Gaetano, 62, 132-34, 137
Moss, Annie Lee, 144-46
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 1 12
Multiculturalism, 17, 220

Namier, Lewis B., 2, 3
Nash, George H., 88, 100, 129. 167, 168,
225, 22"

National Endowment for the Arts, 1 3
National Endowment for the Humanities,
14, 116, 176

National interest, 7, 38, 40, 49, 186-88
National Interest (journal), 113. 116
Nationalism, 10,40,44,73,74,77, 143,
206, 207

National Review, 2, 14,79. 105, 122,
129-31, 134, 191, 192. 195, 196, 198,
224-2"'

Neoconservatism, 12-14, 88, 89, 91-93,

95. 96, 1 10-14, 1 16, 1 17, 130, 13".
149, 176, 204, 222-24, 229

New class, 68, 93, 1 13-16, 173, 21 1, 212
New Deal, 1 1. 88, 100, 102, 106, 110.

1 14, 1 15, 122, 165, 168, 1"3, 199,

202, 204, 205, 2P, 222, 224, 225
New Republic, 13

New Right, 8, 9, 1 1 . 1 3, 16, 60-62, 68-

78.86.87.91.93.96, 109, 110. 116,

1 17, 130, 138, 148. 164, 204, 230

New World Order, 6
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 103, 192
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 131, 132, 134, 19”
Nixon, Richard M., 75, 148. 16", 201,

203

Nock, Albert Jay, 22"

Novak, Michael, 1 12

Old Right, 2, 3, 7,9-17, 60, 69-” 1 ,
‘73-"7_\ 88, 89, 91-93, 95. 105. 1 16,

236

Index

1 1“\ 176-79, 204, 208, 209, 224-30.
See also Paleoconservatism
Orwell, George, 13", 209, 210

Paine, Thomas, 6

Paleoconservatism, 13, 14, 18, 176-80.

See also Old Right
Panama Canal, 25, 32, 62, 74, 109
Pareto, Vilfredo, 2, 3, 132-34, 13", 209
Parsons, Talcott, 105, 106
Patton, George S., 3 1
Peace Corps, 22
Pelagianism, 21, 127
Pericles, 6"T
Perot, H. Ross, 9

Phillips, Kevin P., 87, 104, 199-207
Picasso, Pablo, 1 34
Pinkerton, James, 223
Podhoretz, Norman, 93, 110, 111
Polk, James K„ 35, 52, 53
Populism, 13, 16, 60, 200
Possony, Stefan A., 21 1
Potter, David, 105
Pound, Roscoe, 2 l-1

Presidency, 10, 11, 13, 35, 51-52, 59,67,
"5-77, 82, 85, 103, 163-68, 170-75,
228

Progressivism, 63, 98, 10", 109, 168,

213, 214, 21", 219, 223, 2 2^
Protectionism, 42, 72, 168
Puritanism, 6, 23

Quigley, Carroll, ^8

Rand, Ayn, 196
Randolph, John, 37

Reagan, Ronald, 5-8, 10, 1 1, 14, 16,74,

89, 101, 113, 129, 148-50, 160, 163,
16^-72, 174, 199-201, 203, 204, 207,
228

Reaganism, 200, 204, 205
Realpolitik, 23, 24, 27, 28
Reeves, Thomas, 148
Republican party, 8, 13, 18, 58, 60, 67,

90, 91. 101, 148, 170. 199, 201, 202,
205, 228

Riesman, David, 105, 13"

Rockford Institute, 14
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 67, 100, 106, 140,
164, 206, 216, 219, 225
Roosevelt, Theodore, 205
Rose, Arnold, 45, 76, 105

Rossiter, Clinton, 93
Rothbard, Murray, 130
Rothschild, Edward, 145, 146
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 90, 213
Rowan, Carl, 157
Rubin, Barry, 186

Schlafly, Phyllis, 112
Schlesinger, Arthur M., 103, 172
Schumpeter, Joseph, 196
Sectionalism, 55
Seward, William, 54, 55
Skinner, B. F., 215

Slavery, 27, 28, 40, 48, 50-54, 57, 157,
187

Smith, Adam, 90, 121, 178

Smith, J. Allen, 2 17

Snyder, Jimmy “the Greek,” 153, 158

Sobran, Joseph, 14

Sorel, Georges, 132, 134

Sorokin, Pitrim, 97

South, 4, 5, 8, 19-34, 42, 44-47, 50-54,
56, 57,61,72, 156-58, 196
Soviets and Soviet Union, 5,7,22,23,42,
72, 73, 93, 113, 151, 183, 187, 188,
197, 210

Stanford, 1 59, 220
Steinfels, Peter, 1 15
Stevenson, Adlai, 103, 139, 140, 142
Strauss, Leo, 2,4,80, 88,91, 121, 131,
164

Sunbelt, 3 1 , 68, 7 1 , 73-76, 201

Taft, Robert A. ,60, 101, 167, 170, 174,
229

Tariff, 40, 42-46, 48, 50
Teachout, Terry, 191, 192
Teti, Dennis, 165
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 20, 30, 34
Tonsor, Stephen J., 131, 135-37
Toynbee, Arnold J., 192, 193
Traditionalism, 70, 75, 91, 97, 98, 122,
124, 130, 131, 133, 136, 138,208
Trilateral Commission, 60, 73
Truman, Harry, 67, 140, 146, 150, 164,
173. 197, 225
Tudors, 67

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 218
Tyler, John, 5 1

United Nations, 17,73, 168

Index

237

Van Buren, Martin, 51,52
Van den Haag, Ernest, 14, 176-79
Vietnam, 5, 8, 20-24, 72, 104, 140, 155,
163, 229

Voegelin, Eric, 2, 6, 88, 101, 121, 131,
136

Voltaire, 90, 194

Wallace, George, 16, 101, 109, 148,204,
207

Warren, Donald I., 9, 61, 62

Watson, John B., 218

Wattenberg, Ben, 1 10-12, 209

Waugh, Evelyn, 128

Weaver, Richard, 2, 6, 47, 91 , 131, 177

Webster, Daniel, 36, 45,51

Weed, Thurlow, 36, 5 1

Weimar Republic, 186, 189

Welfare state, 89, 93, 111, 122-24, 1 26,
178, 195

Wells, H.G.,6, 181

Weyl, Nathaniel, 21 1

Weyrich, Paul, 223

Whitaker, Robert W., 8

Wilkins, Roger, 155

Will, George, 117-28

Wilmot, David, 53

Wilson, Clyde N., 5

Wilson, Harold, 179

Wilson, Woodrow, 5, 8, 21, 22, 216, 219

Wilsonianism, 5-8, 21-22, 113

Woodward, C. Vann, 27

Wythe, George, 36

Yates, Frances, 1 36

About the Author

Samuel Francis, who completed his doctoral studies in history
at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, is a nation¬
ally syndicated columnist with the Washington Times . He is
the author of Power and History : The Political Thought of James
Burnham and The Soviet Strategy of Terror.

Boston Public Library

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“IN BEAUTIFUL LOSERS SAMUEL FRANCIS STAKES
HIS CLAIM AS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT
CONSERVATIVE THINKERS OF OUR TIME.”

— Chronicles

“Why is the mindset of the Right changing? Because many have come to conclude
that the system doesn’t work. Because many have come to accept the scalding indict-
ment of Samuel Francis’ new book, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American
Conservatism.

“‘Nearly sixty years after the New Deal,’ writes Mr. Francis, ‘the American Right is no
closer to challenging its fundamental premises and machinery than when Old
Rubber legs first started priming the pump and scheming to take the United States into
a war that turned out to be a social and political revolution. American conservatism . . .
is a failure.’ ” — Patrick Buchanan

“This collection of provocative articles and review essays by a Washington Times
columnist deals variously with the quarrel between the Old Right and the
Neoconservatives, the emergence in the last decade of multiculturalism and political
correctness, as well as the shifting of traditional moral, sexual, and social norms.”

— Publishers Weekly

“In Beautiful Losers Samuel Francis stakes his claim as one of the most important con¬
servative thinkers of our time. His work complements the efforts of an earlier genera¬
tion of American conservatives who focused on defining and celebrating the ‘social
and cultural substratum’ on which our freedom rests. His unique and valuable contri¬
bution has been to define the forces that threaten that freedom, while offering a frame¬
work within which we can fight to preserve it.” — Chronicles

ISBN 0-8262-0976-9

$16.95

University of Missouri Press
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